Which website do/did you use for house buying? (MLS, market)

[ssmssm]

.

[Carlingtonian]

One word: rhymes with "deadspin," starts with a color, and ends with a cartilagenous appendage. (They won't let you link to it here because it supposedly competes with other MLS sites.)

[airjay75]

Same as Carlingtonian. That is actually what our realtor recommended to us even though it was sort of against his own interests. Great apps for iPad and iPhone too.

[ssmssm]

Do you guys mean R E D F I N?

[kww]

the above mentioned site is usually more accurate than the other marketing sites (Zillow, realtor.com, etc), but I think mrishomes.com is best, as it feeds directly from the local MLS.

That being said, nothing beats having a custom search set up from an agent that will drop homes fitting your criteria in your inbox the moment they hit the market, IMO..

[HokieFan]

Realtor.com.

Originally Posted by kww

That being said, nothing beats having a custom search set up from an agent that will drop homes fitting your criteria in your inbox the moment they hit the market.

Then when we got serious, we hooked up with a Realtor and did this ^^.

[acgood]

I recommend the same site as all the others. You can set up pretty sophisticated email alerts which is crucial with the speed that good listings are getting snapped up.

My realtor did many amazing things for us, but finding listings that met our criteria that I didn't find on my own wasn't one of them...

[NOVA_guy]

Originally Posted by kww

That being said, nothing beats having a custom search set up from an agent that will drop homes fitting your criteria in your inbox the moment they hit the market, IMO..

Agreed.

The problem with Zillow and some of the others are that they tend to update late so you'll see something you like, get excited only to find out it was put under contract a week ago. Having an agent makes it a lot easier because you can find out the status of it and other details right away.

[airjay75]

According to my realtor, the reason he recommended using Redfin over Zillow or realtor.com is that Redfin does actually update in real time.

I definitely thought a realtor was valuable - would not have wanted to buy a home without one. But, I found it incredibly valuable to have a tool like Redfin. You can look through dozens of home in a relatively short amount of time. Mostly what we did was find homes we liked on Redfin, emailed them to our realtor, and he would arrange the showing. As obsessive and in control as I like to be, I just think that any home my realtor would have found for us would have been one I had already seen online.

[JfromReston]

I use the Frankly site and homesdatabase.