Looking for a house

So, we're looking to buy a house in Seattle. We're living about 850 miles away from Seattle. That's a 15 hour and 13 minute drive without traffic. But, it turns out we can find an incredible amount of information about Seattle houses on the Internet, without ever leaving our living room. I probably shouldn't be surprised, this being the information age and all, and computers being my, you know, my job and all. But I am.

Here's what my wife and I do every day. Or at least, the days on which we feel like procrastinating on our PhDs (I'll write about that some other time):

We start our search by going to BradHinckley.com, an easy to use web site listing real estate. There seem to be quite a few sites seem to work well, but we've settled on this one. It's very easy to do a property search for houses that have come on the market in the last day ¹. Give it a try. The listing show up on a map, and you get to see details including (usually) photos. Here, there's already a lot of information at your fingertips.

If we find a house we like, the next step for us is to check out the neighborhood. The first thing we do is look at maps.google and get a better idea of where in Seattle the address is. This is important to us, since I'd like a reasonable commute to work, and we both want to be in walking distance to shops and restaurants. To check out traffic, I use the Puget Sound Area traffic congestion map, giving current and historical traffic data every ten minutes going back to October 2003.

To check out the neighborhood shops, we use Yahoo Maps (I won't go into the reasons, but, while I find Google Maps to be a much prettier map, I find Yahoo's local search much easier to use). Finally, if we're looking at a neighborhood we haven't explored recently, we go to a third site, A9's yellow pages and look up some of the nearby restaurants and cafes. A9 has photos of most of Seattle's businesses, and it's easy to "walk" up and down the block and get some feeling for what the neighborhood commerical areas are like.

If we find a house that we like, but it seems to be underpriced, we wonder what might be wrong with it. Now, it's time to do just a little bit more digging, so here's what we do. First, we'll pull up a satellite map of the area using Terraserver. Google Maps has satellite maps too, but Terraserver's are more detailed. Terraserver doesn't pinpoint the address perfectly, however, so we still don't know which house on the satellite map is the one we're interested in. So, now, we have to go to King County's Parcel Viewer. Searching for an address here gives you a view of all the lots in the neighborhood, and you can count how many houses you are from the corner. With these two tools together, you can usually tell whether there's anything obviously wrong with the house, such as nearby freeways, power plants, etc. It's really quite a nice tool.

King County's parcel viewer gives a lot more information as well; I'd encourage you to poke around. You can look up recent tax information, summary descriptions of the house, and some permit information. More permit information is also available at Seattle's department of planning and development.

Finally, take a look at the real estate section in the Seattle Times. They have interesting articles every week or so. I originally found the King county records and DPD sites from an article here.

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[1] If you want to check for new houses more than once a day, you can use decimal numbers, such as "0.5" to search for houses that have come up in the last 12 hours. Here's a cheat sheet of fractions if you don't feel like pulling out a calculate or pencil and paper: If you checked for new listings 6 hours ago, use 0.25; 4 hours ago, use 0.167; 1 hour ago, use 0.042. Not that we do this. To be honest, the real estate market in Seattle doesn't change that quickly.