I love online property search. It takes all of the information that used to be held captive by Real Estate agents and puts it in front of anyone who wants to see it. It allows you to search for your next place in the middle of the night. And it allows you to eliminate properties by looking through photos, instead of wasting gas and time driving around to see them.BUT, it can have its limitations depending on how it is used. Let me explain. Most people use online property search tools by entering a set of parameters: minimum number of Bedrooms, Bathrooms, Minimum Square Footage, Price, Garage, Basement, City, Zip, etc. Which is awesome. BUT, you can miss some really great properties that might fit your needs exactly if you set your parameters up with really narrow guidelines.
For instance, there are some AWESOME properties on the market that are less than 1,000 square feet -- but for some reason the majority of folks enter ˜1000' as the minimum when they search for homes online, and so they miss out on some really well-designed homes. I always recommend not to enter any parameters for square footage, so everything in the area they might like shows up -- then they can narrow down based on size, if needed, on a house-by-house basis.
Decades ago, fitting a family into 1,000 square feet wouldn't have seemed like such a stretch. In the mid-1900s it was common for new family bungalows to be less than 1,000 square feet.But since 1973, the size of the average new home has swelled by 49%, according to the National Association of Home Builders, with separate play and media rooms, laundry rooms and a separate bedroom for each child. Do you really need all of that? Or is it just extra space that will hardly get used, need to be cleaned, heated and maintained, and become clutter-magnets for the stuff that you don't use everyday to accumulate?
Next time you start to look for a home online, try loosening your boundaries -- the house of your dreams might not be what you originally start out thinking that you need!
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