In one of my earliest posts, I mentioned some good real estate sites where you can find a complete list of every property on the market. I gave realtor.com top marks as the best site out there.
While that endorsement hasn't changed, there's another good site I can now recommend: remax.com.
A few weeks ago, remax.com began posting nearly all west-central Illinois properties currently for sale through agents. (I say "nearly all" with a twinge of regret, but more on that in a second.)
Visit remax.com and, at the main welcome page, you'll see several blank boxes that let you type in your search fields. Once you hit enter, you immediately can begin viewing properties.
The best thing about this system? You can easily email us about any property you see -- even if it's listed by another office! (Realtor.com doesn't allow things to work quite this way; an average email sent in that system is routed directly to the agent who has the listing.)
The downside to remax.com? You'll only see listings by real estate offices that have agreed to share their listings with third-party websites. In computer geek talk, we call this Internet Data Exchange (IDX), which means an office has granted legal permission for other companies to publish the information.
Our office is very pro-IDX. We give anyone with a website permission to publish our listings. Our reasoning is simple: Sellers hire us to market their homes, so the greater the number of websites where we publish our information, the greater the number of consumer eyes that'll see that information. To understand the power of this idea, consider the opposite approach: How happy would you be if all your real estate agent did was take your home's information and stick it in a desk drawer?
Right now there are six local offices that have agreed to IDX:
* Areawide Real Estate.
* Coldwell Banker Four Seasons-American Dream.
* Curtis Appraisal and Real Estate.
* Key Realtors.
* Nye Bouslog Agency.
* RE/MAX Unified Brokers (us).
You'll find listings by all six of these offices on remax.com.
Thanks for the information.
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