As we embark on the process of finding you a new home - the one that is the best possible fit for you and your family - we're pleased that you are going to help us identify homes to look at. After all, this is going to be your new home - it's only natural that you do everything you can to make sure it's the right one. Your input into the search criteria we'll be using to identify potential properties, and your feedback once we've had a chance to take a look, will be critical to the ultimate success of the process.
And while we welcome your help in finding homes, we'd also like to help you avoid wasting a lot of your time and energy. So we'd like you to understand how the properties you're seeing on-line got there, and we have a few tools that can help make your search more productive.
Almost every home listed with a real estate company in our market is placed on our Multiple Listing Service, as a cooperative effort between all of the area's real estate companies to share information and provide wide market exposure. And they're not only shared locally - they're shared everywhere, so homes here can be searched from pretty much anywhere there's on-line access.
There are a lot of popular national real estate websites that enable you to search for homes - sites like Zillow, Trulia, Yahoo and Realtor.com, along with the big national real estate company websites. They're pretty easy to use and allow you to search by detailed criteria such as price, size, number of bedrooms, square footage, age, etc. They provide a lot of information, along with photos, virtual tours, and maps. But once you have started your search in earnest, they're really not the best tool to use.
The home information at just about any site you may find on-line is derivative - it all comes from one basic source, your local MLS. And because the hundreds of MLS systems across the country all work a bit differently, in the technical aspects of how they handle data, any website that aggregates all of this data will run into some difficulties. The most common is that homes that are under contract, or even sold, still appear as being available. But there are other inconsistencies and inaccuracies that may occur as well.
We think the best place for you to stay current with our real estate market - to see, in detail, what is actually available - is the source itself, our MLS. And while you're not a member Realtor, and can't log in directly, we do have two tools that will give you access to the same good information we're working with.
The first is WWW.Coloproperty.com. This is the public mirror site for our MLS, and it has all of the homes currently available for sale - the exact same ones that appear in the MLS - along with all of their relevant information, pictures and virtual tours. It works just like the big national sites, but does a better job of staying current, and it covers all of Northern Colorado, from Boulder to Wyoming and from Estes Park to Kansas.
But we've got something even better - it's called MySite. Our MLS will let us set up a customized, on-going search for you, based on your criteria. As new listings hit the market, they will be automatically posted, along with all of their information, to a website we'll set up especially for you, and you'll get an e-mail notifying you that there are new homes to check out. On your website, you'll be able to examine them in detail, discard those of no interest, and save and track the ones that seem to have some potential. Your favorites folder will be where you'll keep the homes we're going to look at the next time we go out. We've had great results using MySite, and our clients have found it to be extremely helpful.
So don't hesitate to fire up that laptop and start searching for your next home. And let us know when you want to go kick some tires - we'll be ready when you are.
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