Tips for Shopping for Real Estate Online

Tips for Shopping for Real Estate Online

It’s the age of the internet and just like buying anything else, most home buyers start their search online. It is an easy way to stalk check out properties and see what your dollar will get you. While looking at pics is fun and a great way to narrow down your top pics, there is no substitute for seeing the property with you own eyeballs. When looking online, here are some things to keep in mind:

More than meets the eye –

When scrolling through all the pretty pics, you’re only using your eyes. In person, you can do more than just see. You can check out the layout and functionality of the home. You can feel if something feels off kilter and you can smell any potential funkiness. If you’re only looking online, you may miss that the gardens outside are filled with a fragrance that can’t be described!

Pretty Pictures—

Houses online can be like perfume ads—highly styled with supermodels. That same model may look a little different without the perfect lighting and makeup—but you’ll never know unless you go! Listings focus on all the best qualities of a property, and may only gloss over any negatives. Not that this is designed to trick anyone, but MLS has a limit on how many words you can input, so the “selling points” are what is being focused on.

Cameras are Tricky-

Have you ever tried to take a scenic photo on vacation and you just couldn’t quite capture the true to life beauty of the scene? In the age of photo-editing and wide-angle lenses, it is sometimes difficult to capture a true sense of the size of a room with a photo. Cameras often create a disparity between what is seen “on screen” and the true-life picture, so a room that may seem tiny in a photo may actually be large and a room that looked huge is much smaller than you expected. Also, not all photos do a property justice. Sometimes the house is great but the photos don’t convey that—they could be too dark or weird angles. Focus on the details of the home itself, not the quality of the pictures—you may just find a hidden gem for a great price because the brick that looked magenta in the photos is actually a pleasing traditional red.

This is all just a whole lot of words saying that nothing can replace seeing a place in person. It could go either way—could be much better or much worse in person. It is easy to fall in love with online photos and dreamy descriptions of a place, but unless you’ve seen it, you haven’t seen the full picture.

Lisa E. Priest loves to stalk houses online just as much as anyone else and is a Broker/REALTOR® with Picket Fence Realty, Inc. You can reach her via phone or text at 903-948-3343 or read more at BuyPalestine.com.