How to use apps to find a home for sale

Looking for a home to buy the old-fashioned way — cruising around looking for “For Sale” signs and checking local classifieds – can get pretty stressful. But it doesn’t have to be. Thanks to apps such as Zillow and Redfin, you can use your smart phone or computer to find homes that fit what you’re looking for faster and easier. Better yet? The ones we mention here are all free.

1. REDFIN (https://www.redfin.com/mobile): See a house you’re interested in, open the Redfin app, and the map opens with information about the house with a quick touch. Listings are updated every 15 minutes, the app lets prospective buyers search a data base — more than 70 million addresses, including here in the Anchorage and Eagle River, Alaska area, and do custom searches. You can also see when open houses are, agent contact information, and more.
2. ZILLOW (zillow/com/mobile): Zillow has been around for years and is probably one of the most well-known real estate apps out there. It contains probably the largest inventory of properties across the nation, and offers superior capability when it comes to sorting listings by different criteria. Even if a home is not for sale, the app provides “Zestimates” of home’s current value. These can often be wildly inaccurate, so it’s best to check with an experienced, local Realtor to make sure you’ve got the right information. If you’re interested in properties in Eagle River, Wasilla or Palmer, Alaska or the surrounding area, feel free to give us a call for a quick property review.
3. HOMES (http://www.homes.com) Homes.com puts millions of homes, apartments, condos, and town home listings at your fingertips. You can sort the results by market conditions, neighborhoods, and project your likely mortgage or rent payments with the Homes.com calculator. Each listing is packed with property photos and stats, too.
4. TRULIA (http://www.trulia.com): Trulia’s bursting at the seams with time-saving features designed to make house searching a cinch. Use their filters to find home listings that appeal to you and you’ll gain access to an impressive collection of photos and video tours, along with interactive maps with crime reports, school ratings, restaurants, shops, and more. Trulia also features an affordability breakdown that calculates the full cost of a property, as well as an open house scheduler, a mortgage calculator, and more.
5. HOMESNAP (http://www.homesnap.com/): Originally built for real estate agents, Homesnap has become popular with home buyers and sellers as well. Using their simple app on your smartphone, you can snap a photo of any home to find out all about it. Homesnap shows how much the home is worth, when it last sold, interior features details, local school ratings, similar listings, nearby sales and more.
6. GREATSCHOOLS (greatschools.org): GreatSchools is a great resource for studying geographical neighborhoods. As the name says, this app gives you information about school zones, the individual schools within those zones, and how they rank or compare to others in the state.

When it comes to buying or selling homes, apps are changing the way that people research neighborhoods, learn more about the market, and find the homes that fit what they are looking for. If you’re preparing to buy or sell a home, have narrowed down your search using any of these apps, and ready to check out Anchorage, Wasilla, Palmer or Eagle River, Alaska homes in person we can help. Give us a call at 907-694-4800.