An article last week at U.S. News and World.com offered six secrets for Internet home buying.  Well, not home buying exactly, more like home searching.  From the story:

“As the real estate industry grows increasingly Web-savvy, house hunters can now scour through neighborhoods, inspect front porches, and even peek inside bedrooms from the comfort of their desktops. But while this surge of new information can help you find that perfect home, it can also—at times—make the whole process overwhelming.”

I like to say that knowledge is power.  But it’s true that too much information can be overwhelming.  So how do you wade through the tons and tons of information available online to access just the right info. that will help you build knowledge?  Here are 3 tips:

1.  Know what you’re looking for

Whatever you’re doing online – whether it’s searching for recipes, research for work, or looking for homes for sale – the key to making your search efficient and effective is knowing in advance what you’re looking for, and staying on the right track.

One of the coolest things about the Internet – and perhaps its biggest danger – is that there’s great information everywhere you turn.  So if you don’t know what you’re looking for, and stick to it, it’s really easy to get lost in something entirely different.  You’ll take five minutes to read a fascinating story about megayachts, which leads you to an interesting piece on budget travel in St. Bart’s, which takes you to a history of the Caribbean, and when you look up you realize that three hours have gone by and you haven’t even looked at homes for sale. 

Decide what you’re looking for and resist the temptation to stray.

2.  Learn to spot reliable – and unreliable – information

It used to be that you would go to a tried-and-true, trusty source to find reliable information.  Newspapers.  Consumer Reports.  That kind of place.  Now, on the Internet there are hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of resources on a given subject.  But how do you know which ones to trust?

Blogs are a good example – there are a number of really excellent real estate blogs out there that offer reliable, accurate information.  But there are others that are basically shams. 

Fortunately, the good sites are pretty easy to differentiate from the shams.  Good ones will have links and references to and from other reliable sites, for example.  They’ll talk about information that you find confirmed in other reputable sources.

3.  Spend some time with the sites that offer customizable searches

It used to be that you would have to spend a whole Sunday scouring the classified real estate listings to find a few homes you wanted to visit.  Now that those listings are online, you can easily search for listings that match just what you’re looking for – number of bedrooms and bathrooms, school district, pool or no, etc.

Still, finding homes for sale that meet your criteria (all of those features that you’ve decided you need, plus maybe some of the features you want) can be a tedious, time-consuming process.  Minding the three tips listed above will help you make your home search more efficient and effective.

Hiring a real estate agent with a house hunting service can help you even more.  The MyPhoenixMLS.com Time Saving Home Finder Program, for example, provides buyers with:

• A customized report of all the home listings matching your criteria
• A complete report that includes pictures of the homes, maps of their locations, and more
• Access to your own password-protected site
•  . . . And more, all for FREE, with NO OBLIGATION

Visit http://myphoenixmls.com/hot-new-listings.asp for more details.