The Five Best House Hunting Sites

House hunting is both thrilling and incredibly exhausting.

In the beginning, it’s exciting — all the new homes, the new euphoric vibes, and new visions of where you could see yourself living.

But…

The moment you find yourself knee-deep in searching for homes, things start to wear off rather quickly.

You will spend hours searching through thousands of listings — some viable options and several dead-end leads of homes that aren’t for sale anymore.

It can be exhausting.

Luckily, the days of flipping through a thousand-page book or the need to call a real estate agent to find out information on a home are over.

Online search tools have exploded in popularity and put information into the hands of consumers. With so many tools out there, it can be hard to determine which tools are the best to use, who has the right data and information, and if a site has home you or other sites don’t know about.

Not all online house hunting tools are created equal.

So, my team and I went through the top 25 online search tools and evaluated each one of them. We decided to distill our findings down into what we think are the best online search tools for you.

Not the tools that benefit real estate agents… or our bottom line.

You.

Our Methodology

We picked the five best tools based on their ability to help house hunters find their dream home and win in any kind of real estate market.

That meant the site needed to have the most up-to-date and timely data, and the data needed to be as close to accurate as possible (when measured against the multiple-listing service). The best websites had the most information about homes and listings on the market.

Lastly, the website had to be built with home buyers in mind and for home buyers. It needed to have unique tools, content, and other resources to help home buyers.

Our ranking below is not in any specific order — from best-to-worst or worst-to-best. What follows is our simple ranking of the five best online tools.

Let’s get started…

Tool #1: Realtor.com

Realtor.com has listings that update every 15 minutes from more than 900 multiple listing services across the country.

A 15-minute update time was the average for most house hunting tools. But Realtor.com excels when it comes to its access to all of the local multiple listing services in the country. By far, they have the best access to information about litings.

With their access to the MLS, it means they are guaranteed to have more listing information that is up-to-date and accurate.

Some great tools on Realtor.com include the ability to track your home’s value (if you own one), market summaries that provide insights into potential neighborhoods, and much more.

The only downfall for a home buyer is the company’s priority to real estate agents. Realtor.com is the “official site” of the National Association of Realtors.

Money is made when Realtor.com sells advertising space and other products to real estate agents. Said another way, they make money only when they sell your information to multiple real estate agents in your local area.

If you’ve ever submitted a form on a site like this, then you know what I’m talking about.

How a company makes money influences the decisions they make in business. When trying to grow revenue, they are going to focus on how to drive leads inquiries for real estate agents.

Using this tool is great, but if you’re entering your information, there is a good chance it will be sold over and over again to different real estate agents.

Still, it’s a great tool. If you don’t submit inquiries for information, it’s usually a great site to use and search for homes.

Tool #2: RedFin

One of RedFin’s core missions is centered around data integrity. They have a stark positioning in the market from sites like Zillow that can often host inaccurate, old, and decrepit data on their site.

RedFin updates their site every 10 minutes so you can find new listings first. They do also offer homes in foreclosure, for sale by owners, and almost every MLS.

Another advantage is that they don’t list pre-foreclosures. Some sites list pre-foreclosures and while there may be nothing wrong with it, you often spend time chasing down dead end leads. That’s because a pre-foreclosure could take years to go into foreclosure or it might not ever go into foreclosure.

What we also like about RedFin is their business model. At their core, they are a real estate broker. This means they only make money when they sell a home. This is great because they are putting the home buyer ahead of their revenue.

If they have inaccurate data, that could kill the sale for them. I think they best summarize their company’s values on their website:

“Everyone told us the easy money was in running ads for traditional brokers, but we couldn’t stop thinking about how different real estate would be if it were designed from the ground up, using technology and totally different values, to put customers first.

So we joined forces with agents who wanted to be customer advocates, not salesmen.”

RedFin’s deep commitment to customer excellence and service is what makes their tool one of the best to use.

BUT…

There is a major downfall to the platform, too.

In their home search tool, they will only show homes in areas they have agents. For my local market, they don’t have any real estate agents in Lansing.

So, if they don’t have agents in your area, you won’t be able to use their tool.

Tool #3: Your Local MLS

Every region has their own local MLS. This is the system most of these online websites have to tap into to get information from. Here in my local market, Lansing, we use a database for all homes in the Lansing area.

We enter our information, we update our information, and we research homes in these tools. Most of the time, consumers can access the exact system real estate agents use.

Most systems have a customer portal that house hunters can use.

Since the system is where all of the information is entered, by using the system, you get direct access to the most up-to-date information by the second. Most sites update, at best, about every 5 minutes. To do anything less than that would be too expensive for a company.

The system is funded by real estate agents fees to their local realtors association. Since it’s not a huge revenue generator, it often has less user functionality. In fact, it lacks many of the friendly user design that you see on typical sites and it’s pretty much void of tools.

I recommend it because it is the best way to get the most up-to-date and accurate data. You’re cutting out the middleman and companies that hold the information from you. Instead, you can go direct to the information.

Tool #4: Coldwell Banker Hubbell Briarwood

Okay, we’re kind of partial to this one. In full disclosure, we work for Coldwell Banker Hubbell Briarwood. We’re a real estate agency team part of Coldwell Banker.

But we don’t blindly recommend this site because of our own agenda. It really is a great platform. It updates every 5 minutes with data from the MLS. Most sites don’t come close to this speed. As we have seen, RedFin updates every 10 minutes but most sites sit around 15 minutes.

We also love it because we own the site Hubbell Briarwood and that means you don’t have to worry about your information being sold over and over again. You will only see me or a member of my team. It’s not sold to hundreds of different agents.

You really get the privacy and non-pushy environment to search for a home like you want. Not one where you feel obligated by a pushy agent to buy a home.

Plus, there are some great tools and a great user functionality with the site. It was designed for the house hunter in mind.

By creating a portal account on our site, you can get instant notifications to homes. You can also track which homes have upcoming open houses. There is the ability to save your homes and communicate with a single agent. Your data won’t be sold over-and-over again.

Tool #5: Zillow

You can’t get away without mentioning Zillow. I have a few grievances with Zillow, but it became one of the most popular search tools for a reason.

But Zillow has a few benefits. First, it’s a great site for finding for-sale-by-owners which you really can’t find anywhere else. It also has a tool called make me move which is pretty cool.

They also have great tools like their mortgage calculator and more. But when it comes to search, I would avoid the tool. The information can be inaccurate sometimes.

By using these house hunting websites, you can save yourself quite a bit of time and energy in your homebuying adventure. It can be a long journey, but if you arm yourself with the right resources, sealing the deal on your new home can more easily become a reality.

Get started searching homes today…