Hunt for your dream home online
Use the Internet to research and view potential houses
By Laura Pratt
When Kelly Payne and her fiancé, Gerry McLoughlin, got serious about buying a house, they met with a real estate agent and chatted about their needs and wants. The agent punched all of the parameters into a computer and — presto — a list of possibilities materialized on the screen.
After the couple left the office, Payne continued to receive lists by
e-mail. Payne would print off the listings for the houses that sounded appealing and then call her agent to arrange a viewing. “I liked it because I was in control,” says Payne. “I wasn’t being dragged around to houses I didn’t want to see.”
View interesting homes online
Potential homebuyers are discovering the ease of shopping for a home on the web. According to a recent survey by Royal LePage, some 70 per cent of homebuyers start their research online. The number one reason for that, says Robert Linney, strategic communications manager for the Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA), is the photos. They’re also attracted to the convenience and the national scope of the technology.
Do your research
But the Internet is still more of a research tool than anything else: at some point, homebuyers still need to get old-fashioned and enlist the services of an agent. It’s still not possible to buy a house listed for sale with a real estate board without involving an agent.
You can, however, troll some of the private-homes-for-sale web sites such as Canada Homes For Sale and For Sale by Owner Canada to buy and sell your home without the need of a third party.
Educate yourself
Consumers can start the hunt at the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation to learn more about homebuying.
Visitors to the site can download a homeowner’s inspection checklist and a home hunter’s worksheet, learn the advantages of a new home over a resale home and peruse a list of location considerations.
Browse databases across Canada
Once better informed, potential homebuyers can browse listings of houses that meet their requirements.
The biggest real estate site by far is mls.ca. MLS stands for Multiple Listing Service. This site offers data from 100 Canadian real estate boards and uploads fresh data every day. There is no charge to view the information. In 2001, more than 600,000 new listings made appearances there, says Linney.
With mls.ca, house hunters can input their real estate wishes. Potential buyers, says Linney, shop for homes based on four criteria: type of residence, neighbourhood, price and features. The results will generally appear with a photograph and a brief description, along with information on the listing’s real estate agent.
Also take a look at Homes Across Canada, which has a limited view of some of this country’s listings.
Check real estate company sites
The major real estate companies, such as Royal LePage, have their own web sites. These may contain further details, photographs or virtual tours of the property.
If you do not have a real estate agent and you see a house you like on one of these sites, you need to contact the agent associated with the house. If you, as a buyer, never secure your own “buyers’ agent,” the “sellers’ agent” becomes, de facto, your agent.
Search on your own time
The greatest value of these online house listings, says Linney, is their availability 24 hours a day, seven days a week. CREA research shows that most people tend to use these sites at night.
Consumers are more knowledgeable in this area than they were 10 years ago, says Michael Manley, owner and manager of Prudential Properties Plus, a real estate brokerage firm in Toronto. “They have a way better prospect of finding properties on their own than ever before.”
Evaluate every listing
For her part, Payne came to enjoy her regular house-search e-mail. “When I first met with our real estate agent and she told me how it was going to work, I thought, ‘What are you getting paid for? Isn’t it your job to find me a house?’
“But then the more I saw all the houses and saw the scope of them, I realized it was really the better way.”
Eventually, Payne and McLoughlin put offers on two homes. A house inspection of the first one revealed some nasty soil contamination — so they let it go. But six weeks later, an e-mail arrived describing a red-brick, semi-detached beauty with a front porch overlooking a quiet street. All the work paid off.
