Buying a House in Medicine Hat
Buying, or even looking for a house in Medicine Hat used to be a daunting task for me, being a first time soon-to-be house owner and all. The total number of local Realty and Realtor sites mixed with directory listing sites for home buying is a mess! There’s so much visual clutter and not enough straight forward, easy to find listings for all houses in Medicine Hat. Searching through each one of hundreds of local Realtor sites is time consuming and usually not helpful at all. I wanted to find all houses for sale in Medicine Hat, no matter which seller.
That was until I found out and did a little research about MLS, which stands for Multiple Listing Service. It’s a convenient technology that allows Realtor and other listing sites to display all houses, condos, duplexes or whatever in your area with every search option imaginable from all Realty companies! Better yet, I found a website that uses this great technology in the most convenient way which even allows you to specify regions within which ever area you want using a Google-esque mapping function. This site is called REALTOR.ca.
To use REALTOR.ca the most effectively, jump directly to their advanced search page. If you want to use that great mapping functionality I was explaining, go to their find by map section (this link currently points to the middle point of Medicine Hat, you can move around or refine your search). Like I said, there’s tons of search options, some of which are pretty unique like searching for Open Houses, or the 10 different options under “Building Type”. Like I stated before, this includes all local Realty companies such as Club ‘100’ GMAC Real Estate, Royal LePage Community Realty, Maxwell Team Realty, Re/Max Medalta Real Estate, and Century 21 Brec.ca to name the biggest names.
Most of the Real Estate companies I mentioned above do have some good listings on their own sites, Century 21 (Medicine Hat map link) and Royal LePage being the best examples, but again, it’s only for their listings. Another thing I have yet to mention is homes for sale by owner which is another thing altogether. Maybe that will be something I cover in another post?
August 5th, 2009 at 10:14 AM
derek says:
I really don’t like the interface on realtor.ca but I found the http://www.mhreb.ca Medicine hat Real-estate board website to be extremely useful, especially for finding new listings.
August 5th, 2009 at 10:20 AM
Vaughn says:
To be honest, I did check that site out as well but quickly dismissed it because there was no mapping function; however, you are completely right, the interface is much more simple and straight forward and the new listings function is very nice. I might have to make a follow up post for listing all the house buying resources out there.
August 5th, 2009 at 4:20 PM
Dean says:
One feature of realtor.ca is the ability to save search conditions and name the search, such as Mobile Homes – Gallery View. The search is saved on realtor.ca for 30 days.