My home search & tools
Since returning to SF from London a little over a year ago, my wife and I have delayed looking for a house until we have decided where we want to live. Our eldest child just went through the interview process in the private schools (San Francisco public schools are poor with only a few exceptions) and lucky found a spot so we are only now truly testing our will to raise our kids in the City.
I spent all day looking at single family houses across the city’s open houses. Here’s how my search went:
- -Started with Google base via My-Currency (developement site) for listings
- -Re-Checked listings at SF MLS (this site sucks!)
- -Re-re checked listings at Trulia and Redfin
- -Re-re checked listings at various local firms
- -got annoyed at the fragmentation of listings
- -Found a few properties
- -Checked for tax & prior purchase records at Zillow (some there, some not)
- -Checked analytics at My-Currency
- -Checked analytics at Trulia
- -Read Robert Shiller’s assessment of housing and got scared (recommended reading:”Long-term perspectives on the current boom in home prices”, March 2006)
- -Tried to find a good open homes site and failed so grabbed the SF Chronicle Sunday pull-out (yes paper…I still read paper).
- -Got annoyed that I had to type in the addresses of a bunch of properties to decipher agent language about location (hint to one exuberant agent: Lyon at Geary is NOT Lower Pacific Heights jackass - not even close!)
- -Reviewed some of the price predictions for square feet in various zips in our alpha site.
- -Got annoyed again that this is taking so long
- -went to open houses
- -got frustrated with descriptions that are BS (hint to another exuberant agent: a large closet off of the kitchen is NOT a bedroom unless your dog or cat need bedrooms in your house)
- -got pitched by 10 agents (unsuccessfully).
- -Learned that one property sold for a whopping $600k over to $3.5 (this may be a lie since the agent was using it to justify her pricing)
- -Came home after a full day of research and tours exhausted and feeling no smarter
We real-estate entrepreneurs have a lot of work to do to get this right because this is taking too long, there is still substantial holes in the listings aggregation of all sites including the MLS, and is is still difficult to get things down to numbers. Here’s my review: For listings go to Redfin (only a few cities) or Trulia. For tax and property records Zillow or Redfin. For statistics Trulia. For open house, go fish. For area price predictions and agent reputation, My-Currency (coming soon!)