Recently, there has been new town and city search criteria for MLS in Bostonareas added to the search feature. While searching for a home in MLSPIN (the local major MLS network) used to very easy, you now must pay close attention to how you are selecting your areas and towns to make sure you don't miss out on anything!
My office is in Dorchester, so that's where I get a lot of calls from buyers. It used to be very easy to click "Dorchester" and have all of the listings come up from that area show up and I'd be fairly certain that I wasn't missing anything. There were of course some listings that just showed up under "Boston" and they did not specify an area since it is not mandatory when you are inputting a new listing. This is a way that listing agents would (sometimes inadvertently) "hide" a listing in MLS. You see, you hardly ever hear a buyer ask for "all of Boston". There are no many areas they would usually specify one or several. I'll sometimes also just do a search based only on zip codes (Dorchester's are 02121, 02122, 02124 and 02125) just to make sure I catch everything.
Now, there are thirteen new areas in Dorchester that have been added to the Boston areas. They include common known neighborhoods like, "Lower Mills" and "Savin Hill" and even some less common ones like "Mount Bowdoin". If a listing agent chooses to specify that their listing is in one of these areas and someone doing a search only picks "Dorchester" and not "Dorchester's Ashmont", they will miss it entirely. Conversely, if a buyer just wants "Dorchester's Ashmont" and the search only includes that and the listing agent just put it into "Dorchester", it may also be missed. You have to be very careful!
This is why it's important to check off all the areas in Dorchester to make sure nothing is missed. Now I have to go back and update all of the saved searches I have for generated for clients looking for homes in these areas! By the way, Dorchester is not the only area to have had these added neighborhoods. Hyde Park (two new sections), South Boston (three), East Boston (three), and Brighton (two) are some Boston areas that have recently added neighborhoods to them. Other cities and towns outside of Boston have also had areas added, but they will fall under the old main city or town so that there is little chance of missing something.
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