I know what you’re thinking.  The last thing buyers need is help.  But you have to hear me out on this.  For north Georgia and western North Carolina, like many other parts of the country, inventory of land and homes for sale is very high.  And did you know that many folks looking to buy property, some say as many as 80%, typically start by looking on the internet?

 So what does this have to do with giving buyers more help than huge price reductions or an endless supply of properties to choose from?  You see, the huge inventory and shopping for property on the internet has also lead to an endless amount of web sites to shop for real estate.  It’s basically a mess of many web sites that are mostly divided between the for sale by owner sites and the realtor sites. 

What on-line buyers really want is one place to find properties for sale regardless if they are offered for sale by owner or through a realtor.  

 Does it really have to be an Easter egg hunt when trying to find out what property is for sale? I don’t think so which is why our site, www.mlh-fsbo.com offers buyers the option of searching both realtor and for sale by owner (FSBO) properties in one location. There are a few other sites as well across the country. One service really worth mentioning is Google Base.  I’m sure many of you are well aware of Google Base, which serves as the keeper of data. If you’re not yet familiar of Google Base, it’s Google’s database of everything, including real estate listings uploaded by Realtor and FSBO related sites. Although it’s still being tested, it may not be too far from being the main search tool for real estate. However, because its listings are provided voluntarily as opposed to crawling the web, it may be too soon to celebrate. 

Regardless, the efforts of www.mlh-fsbo.com, Google Base, and other web sites are helping to making searching for real estate easier.  As far as where all of this is going, I’ll let you make your own opinion on that but as far as I’m concerned, I like this trend and think it will continue.