Have you been over to Realtor.com (http://www.realtor.com) lately? They recently added a new feature in their search called "View on Map." It is still being tested and refined but it is a really powerful visual tool for working your neighborhoods.
Here is how it works.
Go to Realtor.com and enter your search paramters as you normally would (city/state or zip code, price range, etc.) and click on the search button.
This will bring you to the first page of search results based on your input parameters.
On the left hand side of the screen is a column showing 10 listings and on the right hand side is a map of your area with the houses marked on it numbered one through ten.
To learn more about a house you only need to click on a number (or on the listing at the left.)
The map is also zoomable so that you can go all the way to street level. And you can overlay satellite images to get a better idea of where the house is and what the area looks like.
This is a pretty good way to quickly scan Realtor.com for houses in the area where you invest.
Could it be better?
Yes it could. Many of us canvas specific neighborhoods rather than entire cities. It would be nice if they could refine their search feature to allow one to put in a street address and tell it to search in a radius around that address. That would allow one to see houses within say a mile of a specific address. That
would be a tremendously useful feature for investors.
For now though, it is still pretty good.
I personally use it to search in specific zip codes (to narrow down the search results a bit) and with a specific price range to get a small sample that I can skim in just a few minutes looking for newly listed properties in areas I invest in. And I use it to get a quick overview of new neighborhoods when I look for other areas to invest in.
If you haven’t given it a try yet, you should. If nothing else, it is a new way to look at listings that just may help you find that next deal.
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