One of my favorite ways to amuse myself is what I call the "serendipity search" in MLS.
I really love houses. I admit it. It's one of the reasons I got into real estate and a big part of why I love my job so much.
Whenever I search online I tend to use fewer, rather than more, words. I simply prefer to sort through the results myself (and completely cannot relate to the average searcher who only looks at the first few results on the page - I dig through page after page).
But I've made it into a game on MLS.
Whenever I need to look up a property address I enter only the street name - no number, no town. Then I scroll through the results looking for interesting houses in towns all over Massachusetts. It's a super way to discover all sorts of great houses that you would never have come across otherwise.
Sometimes for fun I'll enter street names just to see what's out there.
Around here there are certain street names that can be found in many towns and tend to be old streets with cool old houses - Elm, Union, High, Hancock, etc. You'll almost always find some beautiful, old houses for sale on those streets.
Or you can search on River, Shore, Ocean, etc. to find really beautiful waterfront homes.
My colleague at work is as much of a property hound as I am so sometimes we'll go and take a look at one of these treasures - road trip!
An online spin of the wheel - you never know what you'll find.
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That's a fun idea. I go through all the new listings in my market everyday looking for streets that I don't know. Then I pull up the map to figure out where they are. In the process I run across a wider variety of properties and areas.