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| Make The Move To REALTOR.COM |
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Master The Web October 1999 • Vol.10 Issue 10 |
Make The Move To REALTOR.COM Use The Internet To Make Buying Or Selling Your House Easier | ||
Thanks to REALTOR.COM (http://www.realtor.com), however, shopping for a home and selling your old home has gone virtual. While drinking a cup of coffee, you can school yourself on the terminology, learn how to prep your property for sale, and find a home and a neighborhood that are affordable and right for your family. As you tour this Web site, you will also come upon a range of tools and goodies that are useful to those of us who may not even be in the home-buying market.  Site Overview Look first at the geography of this site's opening page. Across the top of the screen and duplicated below in the sequential graphic are steps that home buyers or sellers face. The steps include Getting Started, Buying, Selling, Offer/Closing, Moving, and Owning. In the upper-left corner are Quick Tools, which are shortcut buttons to finding a home, a neighborhood, and a real estate agent. Just under these buttons, are the current mortgage rates. Click the Get More Information link under the mortgage rates to have REALTOR.COM whisk you away to information on almost any financial transaction you can imagine—everything from managing credit to auto loans. Other interesting areas on the home page are Marketplace, where you will find links to various financial and home-related pages; Library, which has a Q&A and glossary section; and Utilities, which includes a site map, FAQ, and search engine. There is also a REALTORS Only section. In the center of the home page, you can review general information for consumers and real estate agents. Between the sequential graphics and columns of information, notice a link that invites you to register for your Personal Planner, a nifty part of the site that we will return to a bit later.
Sellers using the site can read some great tips on how to wisely select a Realtor, set the list price, prepare the house for sale, and market the property, which is even more useful to us non-Realtors. The site shines most brightly, however, as an online station for confused, time-starved folks looking for the perfect home and neighborhood. How To Use Although the sequence of steps developed for you by the site (see Getting Started) makes sense, our experience suggests the wise home shopper will do some background research. You need to learn the language of home buying and selling as well as the scope of your personal financial terrain before beginning to salivate at some of the high-end homes the search results can turn up.
Pre-qualifying. It's also wise to plan ahead and find out first how much house you can afford and whether you can pre-qualify for a loan. If this sounds like a good plan, move to the left of the home page and follow the Marketplace's Finance Center link to the Quicken calculators. Select How Much House Can You Afford?, fill in the required information on the next page, and then click the Calculate button. This brings up an almost instantaneous analysis of the financial parameters of your house search. With this sobering information in hand, you can return to the Financial Calculators page and follow the What Loans Do You Qualify For? link to check out appropriate loans. You will be able to move quickly through the Quicken Mortgage Interview material. Just answer all the questions candidly, and, in less than 20 minutes, you will probably be reading a table of mortgages for which you qualify. You may not want to find your lender via Quicken, but the experience can be invaluable in terms of helping you organize your financial information and establish a sense of where you stand as a potential buyer. You will leave this part of the site knowing whether you can pre-qualify for a mortgage and what the upper limits of the amount you can spend on that new home are. (Fortunately, the house search allows you to set upper and lower price ranges. If you deal realistically with what you have learned here, you will reduce your temptation to overspend.) Checking credit. Next, you may want to get a rough sense of what a loan officer would find when he or she checked your credit rating. To explore your credit, return to the Marketplace's Financial Center, then go to the Quicken calculators. This time select the How's Your Credit? link for a free and very general self-assessment tool that provides a credit analysis based upon the information you supply. If you want a more finely tuned credit report, click the Back button on your browser until you reach the Marketplace Finance Center. Then, click the Credit Reports By Q Space link. Here, you'll find three options for getting a credit report: an $8 report delivered in 30 seconds and a more extensive $29.95 report. (For these reports, you will need to enter some personal information and provide a credit card or loan number different from that used to pay for the report.) The third option is a report monitoring your credit status. All three options include a free look at sample reports. Your Personal Planner Knowing a bit about the language of real estate and armed with pre-qualifying data and credit information, you are ready to begin your search for the home you want. Before you begin, however, you will want to start a Personal Planner. This handy tool lets you store up to six months of information about houses, neighborhoods, and real estate agents. While searching for that perfect house, it lets you save your search results and your search criteria. To open your own Personal Planner, click the Getting Started link at the top of the REALTOR.COM home page. Then, click the Personal Planner link and the Register Now link. Enter your E-mail address and a password, then click the New User button. Next, click the Create Your Profile link. On the following page, fill in your name, address, and the criteria for the home you seek. To finish, click the Save Changes button at the bottom of the page. Now you are ready to begin your search. Find A Home To start, go to the home page and click Find A Home in the Quick Tools section. On the next page, you can search for a home from a U.S. map or by entering a city, state, or ZIP code. If you use the map, you will need to click a state, then a city, and then an area around that city. REALTOR.COM will then take you to that city or area where a ZIP code selection window lets you further narrow your search. Next, you will need to complete a search-criteria form that lets you specify details about the house you are seeking. Finally, your search results appear. You will see a photo of the house along with its cost, location, estimated monthly mortgage payment, and contact information for the real estate agent. If you want more details about a specific house, click one of its buttons: More Information, Map Home, Neighborhood Information, and Mail listing. A listing's More Information button (if it has one), will take you to a Detailed Home Report page where you will find information about the school district the house is in, its lot size, its exterior and interior features, and much more. You can click the Map Home button to get a detailed map with directions to the property, if that information is available. You may also see a Neighborhood Information button that will take you to data on the demographics of the area. If a certain house really interests you, use the Mail Listing button to send information about the house to a friend or relative. Also, make sure you don't overlook the Save To Personal Planner option, which lets you save all the information about a house to your Planner for later reference. Find A Neighborhood Let's suppose your primary interest is in the neighborhood in which you want to live. Go to Find A Neighborhood in your Quick Tools bar on the home page. Again, you can drill down from a map or from entering a city and state or ZIP. Once you find a neighborhood in the state and city that interests you, REALTOR.COM will give you a report that is mind-boggling in its detail and usefulness. In addition to a map you can narrow or broaden, you will find a summary indicating this neighborhood's rankings in terms of schools, education, income, crime, proximity to culture, age of population, and number of children. You will also find some helpful information about average home costs in the area.
Other Nifty Tools Now let's assume you aren't planning to buy or sell a home and that you don't need any of the services we described above. This site offers other tools that are likely to be useful to you at various times in your life. The Home Improvement section, for example, has a tool directory for the tool-challenged among us, as well as a Home Improvement Encyclopedia. You will also want to check out the Moving section for a complete change of address service for $30 and a storage facility locator. The section on Moving Tools includes some informational gems such as a set of crime indexes, a cost of living calculator, and tools to estimate timelines and moving costs. In other words, this site is a clear gold mine for those purchasing or selling a home. It's also a find, however, for anyone who needs to use a loan calculator or wants home improvement tips. Plus, it's just plain fun to go window shopping through other people's neighborhoods.  by Sharon Shaw
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