Finding Home Listings on the Internet

Theoretically speaking, if you have a great real estate agent, you should not need to find home listings by yourself. But the reality is that agents can be too busy or too lazy to give you the full attention that you deserve every day of your home search.

Although there are many web sites that allow you to search the MLS for homes, most of them will not give you the address or enough information to find the house on your own. This can be inconvenient if you just want to do a quick drive-by to check out the neighborhood, and see if you want actually want to look inside the house.

Some of the better home search sites will allow you to save search results or get automatic email notifying you of new listings that fit your needs. Although you will have to register with the site to get those services. Registration is usually free and, for most of the services, doesn't restrict you from using your agent.

So how do you go about finding the listings?

The first place to check is your local newspapers' web sites. Just search Google for the newspaper's name if you don't know the site offhand. Once you're on the newspaper site, look for the link to real estate or homes classifieds. If you are lucky, the newspaper's site will actually have a service that directly searches all the MLS listings and shows the addresses and maps. Some papers might give you the address, but they don't actually search the MLS. They just show the ads that are submitted to them by hand, so you may be missing lots of listings.

Another place to look for listings is HomeScape. HomeScape links to home finding services all over the country, and many of the services do include the address in listings. The downside is that HomeScape does not cover every major area and some of the services do not provide the address information.

HomeSeekers is a website worth mentioning also. HomeSeekers includes address information with most of its listings, but unfortunately it does not seem to include as many listings as other sites, and does not cover as many areas. Still the service they provide on their supported cities is useful. HomeSeekers provides free saved searches and email notification for registered members.

The biggest MLS search site is Realtor.com. Realtor.com does not provide addresses, but it does provide a map of the area. Using the picture from the listing and the map you can usually figure out which house is for sale. This is not the ideal solution, but it is usually good enough to allow you to drive-by the home. One common complaint about Realtor.com is that the listings are out-of-date, so be forewarned. Realtor has free saved searches and email notification for registered members.

If you are still unable to find decent home listings, another service you may want to consider is ZipRealty. To use ZipRealty, you will have to register and basically agree that you will use ZipRealty agents for listings that you find on their site. One big benefit of ZipRealty is that they will rebate 1% of the purchase price of the home if you use them. You will probably do more of the home searching yourself using this service, and might not get as much hand-holding. But ZipRealty's interface is one of the best for a real estate search site. You will have to decide for yourself if this type of service is what you want. ZipRealty has free saved searches and email notification for registered members.