My Vacation Update

Sorry about the long time between posts but I have been kind of busy here. I have managed to do a little riding, some fishing, and a little sleeping also. The adjustment from life in Europe to being back in the good ol’ US of A has been a little difficult but all in all it is coming along well. Where I am staying right now the internet connection can be a little sketchy at times and is sometimes cause for some major grief. I have been writing some emails 3 or 4 times before I can get them sent. I have been able to find some useful sights though and over the next few days I will review a few. None of them are paid reviews or done in exchange for links or anything, just sites that I found useful. So I guess I will start with the first one;

Realtor.com
As you may have figured out a move comes with certain demands such as finding a new place to live. For months before the move we were gong on to this site trying to find a house in our price range and requirements. Now I didn’t find the house that I getting through the site but it did help me to understand some of the home values in the area and also get a good feel for what was available in the area.
Now the site has many functions, it can be used by the buyer, renter, or seller. You can find a home, loan, realtor, or mover. The functionality of the site was great while trying to find a house and that is really the only part of the site that I can provide an opinion on.
Here are a few points that I noticed;
1. The search function worked great. If you put enough time into the advanced options and really dialed in what you wanted it would give you some great options. The only problem with it seems to be what the lister puts into the listing itself. Say the homes I am looking at are in a town outside of a major town. Well it seems that people are listing most of the homes in that smaller town as being in the bigger town. That created a problem and I would sometimes have to weed out a few hundred listings to find all of the houses in the area where I was looking. When it comes down to it, if the person listing the house would have been more specific then it would have made it easier for me.
2. You can create an account and save homes to view later. Me and my wife found this to be a good way to narrow down homes. We would save all of those that were close to what we wanted and then look over them in full detail at a later time. We ended up with about 17 houses saved that we were able to send to our real estate agent. She would then set up an appointment for us to look at the home.
3. That brings me to another point, they have a function that allows you to email the listing to a friend or your real estate agent. Now the only problem that I found was that I couldn’t email them all at the same time.

Now I have barely scratched the surface of the site because they offer a whole lot. Maybe when we do a little remodeling later on we will use the site again. Now for those of you wondering why we didn’t buy a house that we found through the site well here are the reasons;
We were not being realistic in our initial searches. We wanted a home out in the country but when it came down to it the drive was just too far (gas isn’t cheap you know). Sometimes services such as internet were sketchy that far out also. It also seems we were able to find more house for our money when it came to living in a small subdivision.
We ended up making an offer on an older brick home that has a nice living room, kind of small kitchen with a separate dining room, and 3 bedrooms and 2 baths on the main floor. It also had a partially finished basement with one large room (multi functional) and one smaller unfinished room and a 2 car garage. The lot isn’t real big but there is plenty of it that my son won’t be happy cutting it.
As soon as we close I will post a few pictures but until then be looking forward to those articles on a few other sites that I have planned.