FIND YOUR DREAM HOME
Moving from one house to another within a region can be stressful enough as it is. Moving to a new city can be even worse. But maybe you've just received the job offer of a lifetime. Maybe you need to be closer to someone or something in another town. Whatever the reason, sometimes the decision to pick up and move can come sooner than we anticipate.
And when it does, there are things you can do to make the transition as smooth as possible.
In fact, in this digital age, it is easier than ever to do so. Tasks that may have taken multiple trips to your new home city can now be done online in a matter of minutes. In this 2-part article series, we'll look at 2 of the most difficult tasks you'll run into during this process (finding a home, and getting settled into a neighborhood) and suggest some great web tools to help you along the way.
Of course, the first and probably most important responsibility you'll need to tackle is finding the right home in your new city.
Note: These tips can also be helpful if you're moving within the same city, since you will still need to do a lot of research, but they will especially save you time and stress if you're searching from afar.
1) How to Find and Compare Homes Online
When you're moving to a new locale, finding your home can be extremely difficult and stressful. After all, buying a home, as we all know, is a huge investment both emotionally and monetarily.
While it is not recommended that you do all the research on your new digs online and purchase before seeing the place first hand, some online tools can definitely help narrow the field so that you only need to take one or two productive trips to look at prospective homes and make a decision, instead of six or seven.
If you are planning to buy a home on the resale market, the most obvious tool to use in Canada is the Multiple Listing Service (MLS), which offers a comprehensive search engine that can filter by region, house type, bedrooms, view, and many other features. In the US, you can visit Homescape.com and do a similar type of search of the American Multiple Listing Service.
But if your plan is to make your next house a dream home, and you plan to buy a brand new home from a builder in your new city, it can be a little trickier to search the database of available models from the various builders.
You could just do a Google search for builders who are active in that area, and then visit all their sites, one by one, to tour their model homes. But that isn't the most efficient strategy.
In the US, a great alternative to this hunting and gathering approach is to use a site called Newhomes.com, which allows you to search models from varied partner builders in cities all across the US all from one central location. In my testing, some cities fared better than others, so your mileage may vary, but it is certainly worth checking out if you're American and going the New Home route.
To the best of my knowledge, here in Canada there doesn't yet exist a nationwide resource that offers the same type of comprehensive searching convenience. Having said that, however, this is exactly the problem we are trying to solve here at NewHomeAssociation.ca.
For now, we only offer listings for the Ottawa-Gatineau area, but we have tried to offer as many different searching options as possible in an easy-to-navigate user interface. We will be expanding our offerings to the Greater Toronto Area soon, and after that across the country, so stay tuned. Meanwhile, if you're moving to Ottawa, our tool can be a great way to search all the available new home models in the Ottawa area from many different builders.
A final tool worthy of mention is one called HousingMaps.com, which is a mashup of Google Maps online mapping service and the Craigslist online classifieds service. This one was brought to my attention by my friend Rahaf Harfoush, who is a new media consultant in Toronto and pens a great blog about social media here.
In any case, the service is very useful: it scours listings for rentals, resale homes and some new home listings and then plots them by address on a map. The visual can be very helpful, especially if you don't know the area well (or at all.)
The only downsides are that a) it can only provide information about homes that are listed on Craigslist, which is certainly not a comprehensive list and may vary in results from city to city, and b) for now the cities available are US-only, with the exception of Toronto and Montreal. Even still, this one may be worth a look too if you're moving to one of the cities covered by HousingMaps.
And that's it - those are the best resources we could find to help you find the right type of home in the city you're moving to. But what about making sure you find a home in the right neighbourhood?
Well, in the next installment of this series, we will look at how to complement your housing search by learning all about about the characteristics of different neighbourhoods in your soon-to-be hometown so that you can choose to settle in an area that fits your lifestyle and needs. We'll see you back here then!
Meanwhile, have we missed any great resources here that you've come across? If so, please share in the comments so we can all benefit, and I will update the post with any gems you may submit.
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