Lydia Taylor August 24th, 2007
One of the things I like about the MLS Search functionality on NorthoftheSavannah.com is the varied ways you can find homes for sale. The site offers searches by city, county, zip code, MLS code, and by map. There are also lots of prebuilt searches around the site, like the Summerville Real Estate page that shows all the homes for sale in Summerville. The Augusta MLS and North Augusta MLS pages have prebuilt searches by price range, by property type, or by location. And the North Augusta Real Estate page offers a number of prebuilt searches for popular neighborhoods. For all the power of those offerings, they are really intended to drive traffic to the site, and demonstrate the ability of the MLS Search available here. I call it the most powerful MLS search available in the CSRA, and I think it’s fair to say that.
But let’s say your a home buyer and you want something more. How do you bend this site to your will and get it to work for you? Well, that’s super easy, and I’d like to show you how.
Most buyers have a price range, and they know about where they want to be. Maybe they can be very specific and know they want to be near their daughters home. Gotta to be able to spoil - I mean visit - the grandkids! So, let’s see how this site can help these buyers find their dream home.
Lets take a simple search that I did with some recent home buyers. They wanted to be near a daughter and grandkids in North Augusta. They were retired, and they wanted to relax in a more upscale home. They’d studied the market, and gotten pre-approved financing up to $225,000. They had that financing available for the next 30 days, and they were ready to buy. They want to be close to the grandkids, but not too close, so they wanted to look around in Aiken County first, and maybe take a hard look at North Augusta later.
So let’s take a stream-of-consciousness look at how we would do that search today.
The best way to begin is probably with the county search, selecting Aiken County, a price range of $175,000 - $225,000, and a minimum square footage of 2000 sq ft. The MLS search defaults to residential (although they could search for land & lots, and build their own house if they can’t find anything they like, but that’s another blog article.) That particular search yields 43 homes! Wow, that’s quite a lot to sift through. But as it turns out, a number of the homes for sale are located in Graniteville or Aiken. Nothing wrong with those places, but that may be a bit far to drive to visit the grandkids. Maybe we should narrow the search to North Augusta after all.
For now let’s put that Aiken County search in our saved searches list. Yes you can do that here…and those searches update nightly, so you don’t have to redo all that typing when you check the listings tomorrow!
This time let’s try the city search. We select North Augusta, again using a price range of $175,000 - $225,000, and a minimum square footage of 2000 sq ft, and see what we get. Hmm. 24 results this time. We’ve chopped the list in half, but that’s still a healthy list to sift through. But wait a minute, we want a home office to check our investments, and a spare bedroom for the guests, and we need a spare room for the grandkids when they sleep over. We know we need at least a 4-bedroom home, and there are a number of 3-bedroom homes in our search results.
Let’s hit that city search again, but select the at least 4-bedrooms option. That’s it! We’re down to 15 homes with our specifications. This is a great search to save in our favorites. Now we can drill down on the details of each of these and print out some flyers. While we are it, we can map each of the houses we like, and plan to do a drive-by on Sunday after church. Houses may look good on the website, but sometimes if we go through the neighborhood, we find out the curb appeal is not what were hoping for, so we will almost surely knock a few more off the list.
Another thing we can do while we are here is check out the golf communities. Gramps mentioned he likes to play golf on Wednesdays. We can use the neighborhood search and check out Midland Valley Golf Club and the homes for sale in River Club. Unfortunately it turns out that no homes are listed in Midland Valley, and the one home for sale in River Club is well out of our price range. That’s OK, we can also check out North Augusta Country Club. There isn’t really a neighborhood search available for that, but we can use the map search to hunt around. Turns out, a couple of listings on our original list are very near the River Club. And there is also a house on our list near the North Augusta Country Club. Great!
Now we have three homes that offer convenient golfing in addition to meeting all of our original specifications. Those are definitely some houses to save in our favorite listings list. The only thing thing these home buyers would have left to do is contact Lydia Taylor and buy some Elegant Real Estate!
I hope this write-up encouraged you to check out the home listings search I have here on my website. I’ve spent a lot of time designing it, developing it, and, well, paying for it (!). If you have any questions at all about how to use the search here, or have some suggestions on how to improve it, please let me know. I am available anytime to help you in your search for the perfect home.
