What's In My Potential New TN Town? (real estate, home)

[LauraC]

One of the things you want to do with online relocation research is to eliminate towns from your list so that when you visit, you can spend more time in fewer towns more likely to be the kind of towns you are looking for.

Presumably you have gone to Sperling's Best Places and the City Data pages to find out basic things about your potential new Tennessee town like population, weather, cost of living, water quality, air quality, etc. And, presumably you have also looked at pages like the local Chamber of Commerce, the Visitor's Bureau and in our case, Tennessee Vacation, the official vacation site for Tennessee (a very good website, by the way). You may have even checked out Tennessee.gov. to see state requirements/laws.

Now it's time to find out what's in your short list of Tennessee towns to see if the things you like/like to do/need are in your town or if there's a big enough variety to suit you.

Go to:

http://www.yellow.com

From the homepage, you will be able to search 5 different online telephone directories. Select a directory from the list of 6 (I recommend WhitePages.com because if the business has a website, they have a link). If you check "default" you will get the directory of the day (it rotates among the 5).

Fill in the name of the town and select Tennessee from the drop down menu. Leave "name" blank. In the category box, type in the category and hit SEARCH. Here are examples of some common categories you might choose:

restaurants
grocery stores
clothing stores
movie theaters
book stores
music stores
home improvement
electronics
hospitals
physicians
sports
parks
senior
real estate
churches
pets

The next page will break down the category even further for you. Scroll down for all sub-categories. For example, if you selected restaurants, there might be pages for just Italian restaurants, Chinese restaurants, barbecue, fast food, take-out, etc. Click on the link then scroll past the advertisers to the list of ALL results and you will see what's in your potential new town.

P.S. If you don't find anything in your potential new town in that category, before you give up on the town, go back to the www.yellow.com home page and try another directory. You also might want to do the same search on adjacent towns.

Hope this helps you eliminate the towns that don't have enough of the things you like or encourages you to visit it before you relocate because it does have the things you like/need either in the town or in the adjacent towns.