JayMcCormack.com

My wife discovered a great little trick when doing some property research at realestate.com.au.

So many properties are listed for sale without any indication of the cost of the property, this frustrates no end.  Imagine the time estate agents would save if they didn’t have to answer the phone to questions like “How much is that property on Clyde Road�.  Come on… this is like sales qualification 101 isn’t it?

Anyway, there is a way to get a ball park price for a property!  Firstly you will need to create an account on the site, only takes a few minutes and is free.

After you have created your account, find the property that you want to see the ball park price for.  For the sake of this example, I picked this property.

On the right side of the page is a “Email me similar listings� link.  Click this and after confirmation you will be taken to a page listing all of your property alerts.

Property alerts are basically subscriptions that you sign up for based on the criteria that you set.  Now that you have a subscription to properties like this one, the description for the newly added subscription will actually indicate the price range.

So you know, when an agent enters a property into the realestate.com.au system (which I have seen) they are forced to enter a property value and given the option to show it on the listing.

• Leave a comment... (0)

My wife and I have been looking for the perfect family home for a while now.  We know what we want, however can’t always rely on the descriptions given in the newspaper or on the internet for property.

There are a few things to really annoy us about these descriptions, mostly however it is the distinct lack of mentioning anything about the power lines that cross over the property, or just next to the property, or the main road that’s just over the back fence.

So in an effort to come up with a better way of disqualifying properties before wasting our time actually walking through them I came up with a combination of things that will get me the information I am looking for without leaving my office.

Firstly, you’ll need the following:

• Google Earth installed
• Access to some tool that will give you longitude and lattitude for a street address.  In the US this is a little easier than in Australia.   Luckily however in both Victoria and New South Wales there are government websites that can give you this information.  No doubt the other stats have them too, for the example below I will be using Land Victoria

Here’s what we do:

1. Find the property you are interested on your favorite real estate website.  We use realestate.com.au almost exclusively, I’ll tell you why later.
2. Get the physical street address of the property.

 

 

3. Find this address in your land search tool.  At http://www.land.vic.gov.au/ you go to the “Interactive Map� and then do a search on the left side of the screen.
4. Having located the property find the longitude and lattitude coordinates.  In the example below the co-ordinates display on the status bar at the bottom of the screen.

 

 

5. Take these coordinates and put them into the search box in Google Earth.

 

 

The format that you enter the coordinates into Google Earth needs to be presice, it has very little tollerance for malformed searches.  In the above example the format was 38 3′ 29″ S, 145 20′ 0″ E

Google Earth will pinpoint the property location for you exactly.  Now that you have a marker you can even relable it and put some notes in so you hae it as a permanent reference.  Further if you want to you can also put in the original URL of the property back on your realestate search site.

Coming soon… find out how to get an overlay of the land boundaries in Google Earth and why it is that we always use realestate.com.au.

• Leave a comment... (0)