Where is the Best Place to Find DFW Homes For Sale?

The Worst Places to Look For Homes For SaleMost home buyers have very little idea where to find homes for sale. They seem to presume that a huge national website with lots of pictures and question and answer pages is a good place to look because they see a lot of activity. Dare I say it; national websites are not your best search option.Websites that contain listings of homes for sale from all over the country pull that information from a variety of sources, some of which are unreliable. There are some websites that do not report sold or pending transactions. A buyer might find the “perfect home” for sale but that home has already sold months ago. It takes a few hours to a few days for some of these websites to update their information as well. A buyer is rarely assured that information is current, much less accurate. It can be very frustrating and upsetting to try to rely on information that appears to be correct but is actually wrong.

Agents Who Advertise as Area Specialists

A so-called area “specialists” may not be a specialist at all. A agent's own website, as an example, will not direct you to a competing real estate brokerage, but many national websites actively encourage agents to advertise. These websites charge agents a fee to advertise themselves as an area or other type of specialist. It is a revenue stream for the website companies, and it gives real estate agents who might not otherwise receive exposure online a place to be found.

Is that agent who might be offered as one out of four agents to help you actually an area specialist or is that agent a budding entrepreneur with extra money to pay for that special placement? You won't ever know. It is more likely that the agent is not the area specialist because typically these types of advertising opportunities tend to appeal to newer agents who are looking for buyers to help build their business.

An “area specialist” is usually an agent who lists and sells a lot of homes in that area. Although, there are some parts of the country where agents specialize in working only with buyers, and these are typically known as buyer's agents. It can be confusing. To clarify a bit you should ask the specialist how many homes that agent has sold in that area. Find out whether the agent specializes in representing buyers or sellers or both.

Best Places to Find Homes

The best place to find homes for sale online is to receive that information directly from a multiple listing service (MLS). Multiple listing service listings are updated in real time. Only licensed real estate agents and some other paid participants have access to this information. A MLS service may feed listings to a local newspaper or to its own public site but it won't contain all the information a real estate agent has access to. If an agent agrees to email you listings than that agent can arrange for the listings to be sent directly from MLS.

Most real estate agents have the ability to specify geographic boundary searches or can do custom map searches for you, which is very useful if you are searching in more than one ZIP code. Some systems allow emails to go out several times a day or even every hour on the hour.

If you’re not ready to buy a home or to ask an agent to send you automatic emails of listings, your best bet is to find the real estate company in your area with the most listings. This firm will probably maintain an active website as a marketing tool which will provide information on listings through its own idx feed from MLS.

Be sure that the brokerage provides listings from all brokers and does not just their own listings. Typically, at the bottom of the page somewhere you will find information as to the brokerage that owns a particular listing.