Thursday, November 19, 2009

Home Search Via the Internet

Realtor.com is our new favorite website. We search almost every morning to see if any new and interesting homes have popped up in our target section of Vermont. Although we are not yet ready to move, this gives us some insight into neighborhoods, where stores and schools are in relation to homes, and where the mountains are in relation to everything.

An interesting trick we have noticed with a few homes is that they go off the market for a while, then return with new realtors and new MLS numbers. For example, two houses that intrigued us no longer were listed on Realtor.com. “They must have sold! Darn!” (We want the interesting houses to stay on the market just for us, until we can get there for a showing.) Remarkably, they both reappeared in the last two days. One had almost all new interior and exterior photos, which revealed to us that a home stager had been at work. Of course it had a new realtor. The other home had a new exterior photo and a new realtor. Both had the same prices as they had when they dropped off the MLS.

Several homes to which we have taken a shine have suffered from ambitious pricing. One of the houses mentioned above had had its price slashed twice for a total of $45,000 during its previous stint on the MLS. A cute little house about 15 miles from Middlebury just had its price cut five percent. Of course, we only can see these homes on the Internet. If we were in Vermont touring them, we might see why price reduction has been necessary, or we might see why we should not be interested in them at all.

A couple of houses we have watched have disappeared never to return. For fun, we looked up a lovely house in Bristol VT over which we had drooled. That house not only went quickly, the owners got a good price for the property. That house simply was not meant to be ours.

Wonder which one is?

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