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Internet Life personal real estate

Real Estate

  BY LAMONT WOOD   

Want a good overview of the housing market in a given location? We're not thinking about buying or selling, but we learned a lot about the housing market in our Web travels. There were, by one search engine's count, about 4,000 real estate Web sites, the vast majority offering strictly local coverage, even when their names suggest national coverage. We present here sites that have, at the least, a multi-state view. They're good research tools, too, with lots of links to local and regional real estate agencies. Many allow you to post your own property for sale. Because listings are fairly sparse at this point, the Web won't drive agencies out of business for a while, but it's a good place to start looking.



Accnet may represent the future direction of national Web real estate listings. While it does offer a searchable selection of directly posted listings, the main draw here is surely the Sherlock search engine, which searches about 50 other sites based on your keywords. To be a great service, it needs to search about 80 times more sites than that, but the search results vary from individual house listings to whole services, so you can start a fruitful hunt here.


The listing of states in the Rentals section of Homeward Bound includes an entry for Olympics, which contains rentals in the Atlanta area during the 1996 Olympics. Instead of the search engines offered by other sites, which can be overkill, this site provides just a list of states that have properties listed. The method seems to work better. Also covered are condos, vacation rentals, and land. Ads are $20 a month. Just wish they hadn't confused Texas and Tennessee.



Properties OnLine offers a clickable map of the U.S. and Canada that lets you drill down to a particular state or province, each of which contained at least a few listing when we looked. Most were posted by agents and did not include photos. Others were links to local real estate Web sites, some of which have sparse listings. This service will also perform a manual search according to your specifications.


While operating in nine states rather than nationally, the For Sale By Owner Connection has the best selection of any non-local site. For $79, you can post your house for up to a year, with a photo and information. We also saw a selection of how-to-sell FAQs, covering open houses, hiring lawyers, and advertising.

If you define community as having neighbors and bemoan modern subdivisions where residents don't know the people next door, you might want to check out Cohousing Network. The idea, it seems, is to have group housing combining private quarters with extensive shared facilities for recreation, workshops, child care, and such. You'll see an archive, a resource guide, and a directory of "Intentional Communities." If the whole thing sounds to you like a reversion to college dorm life, better skip it.

If you are contemplating building a house yourself, look at Your New House. It concerns a syndicated TV show of the same name, taped on location at new-home construction sites. Each episode includes "Mortgage Moments," covering the issue of financing your dream digs. On-line, you can find show transcripts, a newsletter, and lists of tips covering a wide variety of topics, from handling mail fraud to paint spills. There's also a listing of show times and channels.

If you want to live in South Florida or the Caribbean and money is no object, then by all means check out WaterFront/Sunshine Dreams Real Estate, which caters to those seeking luxury homes, with text in English, French, and Italian. If you're in the market for an entire town, look at the listing for Lazy Lake, Florida, being offered for $15 million.

HOUSEsite makes good use of graphics, presenting you with a clickable U.S. map, but only five states had listings when we looked. Those states were well presented, though: From a state map, you drill down to a regional or metropolitan map, then to a town map and its listings. The listings consist of thumbnail pictures and prices, and clicking the thumbnail would call up full details. It will be a fine system if it can become truly national.

PalNet is fairly empty, but it has big plans. We saw only 10 metropolitan areas listed, but scores of others were under construction. The listings are arranged by price, and some include a color photo and a listing of rooms and their sizes. This site has potential.

Despite a misleading name, www.homeplan.com (don't type in the URL, it'll take you to the wrong page) will be of interest to you if, like Bill Gates, you want to have your house built from scratch. It boasts a collection of links to architects, designers, builders, landscape artists, and sources of home automation networking systems, plus sources of more common home products like flooring and appliances.

Relocation rather than real estate is the theme at bestagents.com. Of course, relocating usually involves real estate transactions, and the site offers to line you up with agents to both sell your old place and find a new one.

The Home Buyer Real Estate Service had listings for 20 states, although some had only one offering each.

Unfortunately, the Prestige Real Estate Listing Service is a typical example of the status of many national real estate classified ad sites: Listings are $12 for one month or $20 for six months, and there were only five listings.

Equally sad was the altEstate. For $85 you can run your ad, including a color photo, for six months. But there were only eight listings, although some were whole housing developments.

Homes Online is still an empty nest. We saw an elaborate search engine that's typical of local sites: You search according to style, size, price range, number of bathrooms, and size of lot. But as far as we could tell, there were only three listings.

At the Internet Real Estate Network you can list your house free for a month, or pay $3 to add a photo. Agents can list themselves for various fees. Again, an elaborate search engine sits atop slim pickings.

In England, we found PropertyFind, a buyer's agency. "We work on the basis that we can find any type of property as long as it exists," they state. We doubt nonexistent property is a big problem in the United Kingdom, but we're pretty sure they'll search on your property criteria.

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Accnet

Homeward Bound

Properties OnLine

For Sale By Owner Connection

Cohousing Network

Your New House

WaterFront/Sunshine Dreams Real Estate

HOUSEsite

PalNet

www.homeplan.com

bestagents.com

The Home Buyer Real Estate Service

Prestige Real Estate Listing Service

altEstate

Homes Online

Internet Real Estate Network

PropertyFind