Gary & Doris Peckham
Coldwell Banker
Email: carealtor@comcast.net
With the internet so available to us, we often begin our search for a property surfing the net. 86% of buyers begin their search on the internet. Long gone are the days of looking at magazines and newspapers for listings. Most realtors do not put their listing in these publications as they cost money and the investment is not cost effective.
Even with the many sites that exist to find properties on the internet, there are many sites that are better than others. We will give you some insight into which sites may make your time more productive than others. Our biggest complaint about some sites is that a property is listed for the public to find even though the property may already be in escrow with an accepted offer. The site may not publish the current status even though someone has already beaten you to getting an offer accepted. We imagine the sites do not tell you the status because their system does not have the capability and secondly they want to capture your business by making you think their system will lead you to the property of interest. If you see a site with listings stating the property is ACTIVE, CONTINGENT, PENDING, etc then you are in good shape to understand what the status is before spending much time on the site. It has been our experience that one site seems to not let you know the real status of property and the site is Trulia. Trulia is a well visited site and has adundance of information for users however we get so many leads for listings that are already in escrow.
Coldwell Banker Northern California has an unique tool called myREcafe that provides alert emails to our clients for listings that match their criteria. Our clients can enter and maintain their own searches or we can input them for them. The application wil inform our clients if the listing is no longer available for sale and not in escrow. This feature saves us and our clients significant amount of time. In a fast moving market, status changes fairly rapidly and having access to the exact status is very useful.
So when you start to search the internet again for your dream home that you want to find to purchase, remember the lessons of this article in chosing where to look. Perhaps, you will obtain more accurate information from your time spent looking?
