Real Estate Agents and the Internet - How to Buy and Sell Real Estate Today

 Afterward and Now

Ten years ago, a search for real estate would have were only available in the office of a local real estate agent or by just driving around the area. At the agent's office, you would spend an afternoon flipping with pages of active property listings from the local Mls (MLS). After choosing properties of interest, you would spend several weeks touring each property until you found the right one. Finding promote data to enable you to assess the asking price would take more time and more driving, and you still might not be able to find all of the information you should get really comfortable with a fair market value.

Today, most premises searches start on the Internet. A quick keyword search on Google just by location will likely get you thousands of results. If you spot a home of interest on a real estate web site, you can typically view portraits online and maybe even take a virtual tour. You can then determine other Web sites, such as the local county assessor, to get a design of the property's value, see what the current owner given money for the property, check the real estate taxes, get census data, class information, and even check out what shops are within going for a walk distance-all without leaving your house!

While the resources on the Internet happen to be convenient and helpful, using them properly can be a challenge a result of the volume of information and the difficulty in verifying its accuracy. At the time of posting, a search of "Denver real estate" returned 2, 670, 000 Web sites. Even a neighborhood specific search for real estate could easily return thousands of Web sites. With so many resources online how does a trader effectively use them without getting bogged down or winding up with incomplete or bad information? Believe it or not, understanding how the business about real estate works offline makes it easier to understand online real estate material and strategies.

The Business of Real Estate

Real estate is typically traded either through a licensed real estate agent or directly by the owner. The bulk is bought and sold through real estate brokers. (We use "agent" together with "broker" to refer to the same professional. ) This is due to most of their real estate knowledge and experience and, at least historically, their valuable exclusive access to a database of active properties accessible. Access to this database of btl property listings provided the foremost efficient way to search for properties.