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FEATURES YOU CAN'T MISS September 2000 • Vol.8 Issue 9 Page(s) 109 in print issue |
Real Estate Give Me Shelter | ||
 When Candy Bellin snagged her dream job, she had to move cross-country in less than a week. Instead of opening the Yellow Pages in a panic, she calmly fired up her PC and asked her favorite search engine for help. Even though she was about to change states, time zones, and coasts, Bellin was able to use Yahoo! Real Estate (http://realestate.yahoo.com) to conjure up the best deals on a moving company and renting a house. She even used Yahoo! Real Estate to scope out schools and childcare in her new community; all from the comfort of her favorite Herman Miller chair. Like other Yahoo! portals, Yahoo! Real Estate brings a smorgasbord of information designed for anyone who is moving, selling, or finding a home to rent, says the site's producer, Nate Smith. The site includes more than 1.3 million listings of homes for sale and rent. You can also search for homes from a variety of different places, save the ads, and even post your own real estate listings absolutely free. Buying. Under Buying, you can search classified ads across the country for your dream home or rental. You'll also find tools for determining mortgage quotes, interest rates, and an arsenal of calculators for everything from rent vs. buy to a payment calculator. Even better is a calculator that'll let you look up what homes have been selling for in a specific area. You can search by location (all homes on a particular street, for example). The search engine also lets you search by price range, so you can find all the houses in Lake Hollywood, Calif. that sold for between $300,000 and $325,000. You simply decide which search you want to conduct, enter an address or price range, and click the Find Homes button. "This feature quickly gives you a good idea of what your home is worth," explains Smith, "while also allowing you to see what neighbors have paid for their homes." Selling. Every section is brimming with helpful links, search engines, and calculators. The Selling section, for example, features tools to estimate the financial considerations of selling a home. A Capital Gains Calculator can determine if you're subject to any taxes on the sale of your home. An Improve Or Move Calculator contrasts the cost of moving into a new home vs. improving your current home, while the Stay Put Or Buy Calculator compares the monthly cost of buying a larger home vs. the current monthly costs of staying in your old home.
Improving. By teaming up with ImproveNet, Yahoo! can find reputable building and home improvement professionals in your area. As with a software wizard, you'll be walked through the process of finding a contractor using your ZIP code as a starting point. If you're worried about credentials, don't be; ImproveNet screens every contractor. Research Tools. One of the most impressive sections is the new Research Tools. Located on the home page, you can quickly compare the cost of living between two cities in several ways. One calculator compares real estate and quality of life. Another compares salaries, so if you've been offered a job in another city, these calculators can throw cold water on that hot job by determining the real value of your new salary. For example, someone moving from Lincoln, Neb., to Los Angeles, would be horrified to discover that an annual salary of $50,000 in Lincoln is the equivalent of $88,666.67 in Los Angeles! Conversely, a $50,000 salary in Los Angeles is the equivalent of only $28,195.49 in Lincoln. So moving in one direction increases your salary by almost 50% while moving in the other decreases it almost as much. About the only thing you can't do in Yahoo! Real Estate is move content around on the home page as you can in My Yahoo! or Yahoo! Finance. You can personalize My Yahoo! with a smattering of Yahoo! Real Estate options, including Mortgage Monitor, but these are mostly cosmetic. You can't, for example, currently include any of the Research Tools or even Real Estate News in either My Yahoo! or the New Ticker. But like most things in Yahoo!, that's soon to change, according to Smith. One new feature that will be introduced by the end of the year will be alerts for classifieds. These will be listed both under Yahoo! Real Estate and in Yahoo! Alerts (http://alerts.yahoo.com). Just like the alerts for cars, auctions, and personals, you'll be able to configure Yahoo! to alert you via e-mail when a house in a certain area becomes available at a specified price. (For more information, see "Alerts" in this issue.) by Michael Cahlin |
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