I’m kind of obsessed with Real Estate lately.
It’s been two years now since I had to do a short sale on my first home purchase (a dumb one!), and I can’t help but look at the much more attractive prices in the Seattle area now.
Of course, I won’t be actually buying a house in Seattle any time soon. But, sigh, I love looking. It’s like my gossip magazine. You know it’s pointless, but it’s fun.
There are two sites I use when looking for homes in Seattle:
1. Redfin.com
I love Redfin’s interface. It’s slick, big, bold and beautiful. My only gripe would be that they still have some formatting issues to work out when using the site in Chrome (my browser of choice for speed). Also, they don’t cover the Portland market, so that’s a bit of a bummer. But for Seattle, heck yes I love you.
2. Trulia.com
Trulia is my catch all site. I can look up homes in Portland there as well as Seattle. It’s not as fancy as Redfin, but it’s a great workhouse. A lunch-pail, dependable type site for my real estate search wanderings.
I would love to someday be able to get into real estate investing a little bit. There is just something about owning a piece of a building and real dirt that appeals to the farmer in me.
Did I miss any other great real estate search sites? What do you use?
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Glad to hear you love it! Good news, we’ll be supporting Chrome soon (I use it as my primary browser and don’t even notice the formatting issues any more). We are also expanding to Portland this year. If you know any good real estate brokers in Portland let us know as that’s what is slowing us doing right now.
I’m a big fan of Windermere.com ’s map that you can click on. That was my #1 most used tool in the recent purchase of my Seattle home.
For every listing I get from an agent I generally start out with Google Maps to get a good look of the property’s front view, a lot of times if it’s a foreclosure then the agent’s posted picture can be much older than how it looks now. Next I check the specs about it on Zillow.com. That’ll tell me all the technical information about the property such as how much it was previously bought and sold for. For school and neighborhood info I usually check out Movoto.com cause that’s important to a lot of parents (whom you might sell your property to if it’s an investment in the long run).