Surfing for a Property on the Web…
Over the past 10 years there has been a dramatic change in both the way property buyers peruse potential homes and also the way they are advertised. In the late 90s most estate agents started to use websites to advertise the stock of properties they had, and at the same time with the growth of Internet usage, many buyers looked at property for sale on these sites.
In the last few years looking for property has become even easier as big property portals have grown; they consolidate all estate agents property and prices so that with a simple search, all the homes in selected categories can be viewed in seconds. the largest by far is Rightmove with eighty percent of all searches, with other large portals being FindaProperty and Globrix also having a huge inventory of homes to buy and to let. For more upmarket homes Primelocation.com is perfect and focuses on houses from agents such as Knight Frank and Savills. Most of the property portals also provide email alerts from your chosen criteria of property.
The market is continually evolving though and there are new entrants like Adzuna making it even easier by bringing the listings together from many different sites into one convenient place.
Now mobiles and ipads are becoming ubiquitous there are many property apps to both search property and to do other tasks necessary when purchasing a property. There is a handy “app” you can use which is a mortgage calculator from London & Country mortgage brokers.
Like similar offerings from price comparison websites this should only be used as a guide, but it is quite sophisticated.
If you want help finding the area you can commute from, then for Londoners the handy CommuteFrom.com website will show you.
The government publishes a range of incredibly helpful apps with maps that show you everything from the nearest chemist to the nearest post box which are really useful when planning to move to a new area.
One of the most helpful will summarise much of what you might want to know about an area before you move there.
When it comes to buying a home you might be interested to learn what similar homes in the area have sold for. You can search Land Registy data via a number of web sites like Zoopla (which is also a portal) or download the clever Mouseprice app to your smartphone.
Many people only start to consider what their own home is worth once they have found a new property.
When selling its always best to look online as Rightmove have a guide to what your home might be worth.
It can tell you how many people are looking in a particular postcode, how many properties are available, what has sold and, importantly, what is to let.
Looking at property, selling and buying has never been easier using online sites
Silverhairs editor
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