Find Your Own Inexpensive Houses

How to Do Your Own Research

If you want to find your own inexpensive houses in decent towns, one of the best places to start is www.realtor.com. It is usually a slow website, probably due to the large number of photos, and you have to learn how to best use it. Enter a town and state, but leave the rest of the form blank. Then find the link that says, "More Options." This will bring you to a page where you can enter all sorts of criteria.

You can eliminate land for sale, and farms, for example, or request only listings with two or more bedrooms. You also can set a maximum price, or even a minimum. Once you've chosen your criteria, scroll down and click on "Show properties". They will be listed in order from the lowest price to the highest (within your criteria). You can do other things with realtor.com, but this will get you started.

Another way to look for inexpensive homes is in the the classified ads of local newspapers. In this way you'll find houses for sale by owner, and ones being sold by firms that are not part of the National Association Of Realtors. You can find a town's newspapers online, using Google (my favorite), or any of the major search engines. Just enter the name of the town plus "newspaper".

You can also find houses for sale from other sources by searching "homes for sale" or "real estate for sale" plus the city name. So far, I haven't been impressed with the "FSBO" (For Sale By Owner) web sites, where owners list their homes, but this is sure to be a good resource in the future, so you may want to try searching for these sites.

Researching Affordable Towns

You can learn about a town by using Google or any of the other search engines. Most of the time you'll find a chamber of commerce site or official city site on the first page of results, if you just search by the name of the city and state. Reading the local newspaper online can also give you a feel for what kind of community it is. (And you can check the classifieds for inexpensive homes.)

One of the best online sources of information on cities and towns is www.city-data.com. They have information and statistics for most cities in the United States. From the home page, click on a state on their map, and then find the city you want on the list. You'll find more statistics than you can possibly use, and links to even more information. Population, average income, crime statistics, maps, photos - they have it all here.

Www.weatherbase.com has climate information on almost every city in the U.S. Click on a state, then find the city you are interested in, and you can see how many inches of snow they get each year, how much rain, how hot or cold it gets, etc. There is a lot of information here, and a link to the current weather forecast.

When we are interested in a town, we find a real estate agent or somebody from the Chamber of Commerce to call. Again, you can do this online. The phone numbers of the agents are often on realtor.com, and the Chamber Of Commerce sites always have a number to call. List what is important to you, before you call, so you don't forget to ask anything.

We ask about stores, libraries, jobs, whether there are inexpensive houses, and anything else to get a feel for the town. "Do you own a snow shovel?" helped narrow our search before we moved to Arizona. With the easy availability of the internet and low long distance phone rates now, you can know a lot about a town in less than an hour, without much expense or trouble.

Use this link for an article on real estate research.