Searching online for a home: Many websites, varying insights
First of two parts.
If Americans have come to rely on the Internet to search for houses -- and last year, the National Assn. of Realtors says, 84% of all buyers did -- where should one start?
The Web is awash in sites that promise to help focus a home search, with an extraordinary range of tools.
We asked three firms that measure Internet traffic to list the most-visited real estate websites in the country, excluded a few that weren't relevant to our search and came up with a top 10 list of "for-sale" sites. Then we took each site for a test drive, using a hypothetical search for home listings.
Over two days in June, we searched each site for three-bedroom, single-family homes on the market in Santa Monica. The number of homes for sale that the sites found ranged from 49 to 168.
Some of the sites wowed us with maps, data and detailed listings and let us tailor our searches umpteen ways. Others seemed less focused on finding a home than on putting us into the hands of a real estate agent or mortgage broker. Some buried useful tools behind "advanced search" links.
Here, in an admittedly subjective presentation, is what we found at the sites we sampled, ranked according to search results, from the most houses found to the fewest:
Zillow.com: The wildly popular home-valuation site also offers for-sale listings, and it turned up 168 homes with three or more bedrooms, though individual listings were slim on details. The site is loaded with gadgetry, such as mapping the listed homes via Microsoft Virtual Earth; the maps also link smoothly to homes for sale nearby. Its voyeuristic "Make Me Move" function allows people who don't have their homes on the market to nonetheless specify a minimum offer that might get them to change their minds.
Mortgage shopping? Zillow allows users to anonymously enter personal information to shop for rates and terms and claims the anonymity has drawn a strong response from consumers. Zillow's Real Estate Guide is a wiki feature (meaning readers can edit it) about various aspects of the real estate market.
HomeGain.com: The "about" section on the site makes no secret of its dedicated function as a lead generator -- that is, putting real estate agents in contact with consumers. (Full disclosure: HomeGain is a unit of Classified Ventures, a joint venture of several newspaper companies, including Tribune Co., publisher of the Los Angeles Times.)
