Sarasota Real Estate Blog

The Better Way to Search for a Home

Searching for a home has never been easier—or more overwhelming. Open an app, enter a price range and a few preferences, and suddenly you have hundreds of homes at your fingertips.

That’s a great way to browse. But when you’re seriously looking for a home, there’s a better way to search.

Start With the MLS

Real estate agents search through the Multiple Listing Service, or MLS—the database where participating brokers and agents enter and maintain property listings. Many of the homes you see on popular real estate websites originated in an MLS and were then distributed to other websites. What ultimately appears on a consumer website can depend on its data feeds and what information that particular site chooses to display.

Working directly with an agent gives you access to a search built from the MLS itself, including current listing status and a much deeper set of property criteria.

More importantly, your agent can build a search specifically around the way you actually want to live.

Search Beyond Beds, Baths and Price

Consumer home-search sites are convenient, but MLS searches can get much more specific.

For example, perhaps you want to live within a particular ZIP code—but there are two neighborhoods within that ZIP code you don’t want included. Your agent can create a search that includes the ZIP code while excluding those particular areas.

Maybe location is more important than a ZIP code. If you want to live within five miles of your office, a family member, a school or another specific address, an agent can build the search around that location.

Depending on the local MLS and the information entered for each property, searches can also be refined by criteria such as property type, subdivision, garage spaces, pool, waterfront features, year built, square footage, lot size, number of stories, specific architectural or community features and much more.

A buyer looking for a condo could narrow a search considerably by focusing on the features that matter most rather than scrolling through every condo in the area. A buyer looking for a house might want a pool but no mandatory HOA, at least a two-car garage and a particular geographic area. Another buyer might want newer construction but specifically exclude certain communities.

The MLS allows us to start combining those requirements into one useful search rather than making you sort through dozens of homes that were never really possibilities.

Let the Listings Come to You

Once your agent has created your MLS search, you don’t have to keep running it yourself.

You can receive automatic emails when properties meeting your criteria are listed or when relevant changes occur. If you’re actively looking in a competitive price range, you may want those notifications immediately. If you’re several months away from buying and simply watching the market, a weekly update may make more sense.

And the search isn’t set in stone. After a few weeks, we can adjust it. Maybe you realize a pool isn’t as important as you thought, or that you’re willing to go another three miles from work to get more house for your money.

Technology Is Better With Local Knowledge

Coldwell Banker also offers online home-search tools and its Move Meter®, which can help buyers compare locations using factors such as housing costs, cost of living and quality-of-life considerations. These are useful tools for the early stages of exploring where you might want to live.

But technology is only one layer of a good home search.

A local Realtor can add context that a database can’t. We know which neighborhoods are actually convenient to the places you frequent, where new construction is changing an area, which communities have similar homes but very different fees, and where expanding your search by just a few streets might open up better possibilities.

The popular home-search apps are excellent for browsing, saving photos and getting ideas. But once you’re ready to seriously look for a home, ask your Realtor to create a customized MLS search.

Instead of searching harder, you can search smarter—and let the right listings come to you.