Have you heard the term “Web 2.0″ (web-two-oh) yet? This is a term that describes the way people are using the internet today. In general, this means that people who surf the internet are looking for community. Wikipedia.com is a perfect example of this phenomenon. Wikipedia.com has nearly two million articles in English (millions more in other languages), written and vetted by volunteer experts. Anyone can participate in writing articles or adding to articles, but there are other people in the community, other experts, who will be double checking your work. If you are interested in the American Craftsman style movement in residential architecture, for example, Wikipedia.com is a great place to start.

Another shining example of Web 2.0 is Amazon.com. If you’re interested in a book, you can read other customers’ reviews of that book, which will help you make a decision on whether or not to buy the book. Expedia.com is another site that has done a great job of using the community’s experience to help you make decisions. Here you can shop for vacation packages and lodging on-line, and read other customers’ reviews to help you make a decision as far as whether that hotel is for you. Folks who were responsible for developing these two sites have turned their attention to real estate, to give us Zillow.com. These people are smart enough to understand that a real estate transaction is far more complicated and momentous than buying a book or making hotel reservations. But they also recognize that there is a piece of the home-purchase experience that can translate to the internet. That piece is shopping for potential homes. Right now there are 45,821 homes (excluding mobile homes) listed for sale in Maricopa County. During this past year, we have had an unprecedented number of homes available to buy, and if you’re interested in seeing whether there are any homes out there that are of interest to you, the internet is the place to start.

Anyone familiar enough with technology to read weblogs is probably already aware that you can go to Realtor.com to find any house that is listed for sale in the Realtor® associations’ Multiple Listing Service databases (MLS). Using the Advanced Search functionality you can narrow your search down fairly precisely. A word of caution, though… Realtor.com is a national aggregator of all of the local MLS databases. The hundreds of different databases that feed Realtor.com will each use database fields that make sense for their own local areas. For example, the greater Phoenix MLS, which covers Maricopa County and then some, has a field that lets you search for evaporative cooling, either so you can exclude it from homes you are interested in or so you can make sure the homes you see have evap cooling. But this isn’t a feature that exists in the MLS databases in Ohio. So you can’t look for an evaporative cooler on Realtor.com, because that’s a local feature and Realtor.com is national. You can, however, limit the houses you see when you’re shopping here to important features such as size, age of home, amenities such as swimming pools, and community features such as golf. This in addition to the standard search criteria of number of bedrooms and bathrooms and cost range will help make your shopping experience on Realtor.com more meaningful.

So, if you want to find an historic home in Phoenix with hardwood floors, a fireplace and basement plus central air, for under $500,000, Realtor.com can find all those homes that are currently available on the MLS. But be careful… you’ll also see all the houses on MLS that kinda sorta fit what you’re looking for. For example, I just ran a Realtor.com search for the house I described in the previous sentence, and the website returned 7,344 properties, 2,054 of which have more than one photo in their listings. Now of course we don’t have 7,344 fifty-plus-year-old houses in Phoenix with basements (yeah, right), hardwood floors and fireplaces for any price! But what Realtor.com does is it will show you every house that comes kinda close to the criteria you’re looking for, then it gives you an approximation of how closely that home matches what you want, by using a percentage. So in my example, the houses that are most relevant to what I wanted match only 86% of the search parameters I entered. Unfortunately, these searches don’t let you weigh the importance of your parameters. For instance, if I would like to have a basement and hardwood floors, but I would be heartbroken if I couldn’t have a fireplace, and I’d be damned to hell if I couldn’t have central air, Realtor.com can only regard all of these requirements as equal.

When you have finished refining your search, you can register with Realtor.com to save the search. This way, if you create a search that is returning the types of houses you’re interested in seeing, you can use the same search every time you go to Realtor.com to shop.

But what if your ideal home isn’t listed on the MLS? What if it’s listed for sale by owner? There are always the old-fashioned ways to find out what’s for sale: drive the neighborhood you’re interested in or look in the newspaper classified ads to see what’s for sale. But we’re talking about using the efficiencies of the internet to shop for homes. So what other electronic tools are available for you to shop on-line for homes? The Arizona Republic has digitized its classified ads, so you can go to AZCentral.com to look for houses that owners and listing agents have promoted in the Republic’s classified ads. You’ll want to use the Advanced Real Estate Search, which has several advantages: For one, you’ll be able to specify that you want to include MLS listings (Search All Listings), even those that aren’t paying for advertising in the AZ Republic, in your search. Plus, here you can specify some more detail, such as beds/baths, size and age of home, and a couple amenities to help pinpoint what you’re interested in. But you don’t get the level of detail that you have available in Realtor.com. Using the above example, I’m able to ask for only those homes that have fireplaces and basements, but there is no way to search for hardwood floors or central air. My search for these types of homes in Phoenix resulted in seven houses — all from the MLS, but none from paid advertising in the classified columns. Again, you can save your profile on this page, which will let you save your search so you don’t have to recreate it. But there’s nothing very complicated about searches on this page, so I don’t see the value of giving up my contact information if I don’t already have a profile on AZCentral.com for other reasons.

Another on-line site that is quickly becoming the preferred classified ad site of the internet savvy is CraigsList.com. The extent to which you can promote anything for sale is so much richer here than in the newspaper, that CraigsList.com has fast taken over the eyes of people who used to search newspaper classifieds. When I list a home for sale, I can give prospective buyers so much more information on CraigsList.com than I could ever publish in a newspaper.

Another advantage CraigsList.com offers over the newspapers is the ability to search for features that are important to you, and to go beyond simply saving that search… You can set up an RSS feed on that search! This way, whenever anyone adds a listing that contains the features that are important to you, such as historic and hardwood, you’ll automatically be notified that a new listing of significance to you has been posted.

Hungry for some more sites where you can shop for homes? Back to Zillow.com. This site is the brainchild of the people who started Expedia.com, and many of the people on staff to develop the site were there with Amazon.com in the beginning of its glory days. With the help of venture capital, they have developed a beautiful site that lets sellers list their houses, buyers browse through houses for sale and anyone interested in real estate ask questions and get answers from experts in the real estate business in general or even specific houses in particular. There are other “Realty.bot” start-ups out there, hoping to earn profits by figuring out a successful commercial use for the internet with respect to real estate. Trulia.com is another notable contender… a site with beautiful maps and a real sense of community. You can read more about Realty.bots in general in this Arizona Republic article, and more about Zillow.com and Trulia.com on BloodhoundBlog. The trouble with these sights is they’re so new that they don’t have enough listings to make them the go-to sites to see what all is for sale.

And finally, there are the broker sites, many of which take feeds from the the local MLS to make it easier for buyers to search for local listings, as compared to Realtor.com, which has MLS listings for the entire country.

The internet has opened windows for people window-shopping for homes. But nothing can replace the benefits of having a Realtor working for you when it comes time to buy the home of your dreams.

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