In this article, I would like to show you some of the tools which available in the internet that can help you in real estate investment. They are making your real estate investment easy and simple and most of them are free! 

As a real estate investor, we always need to go out and search for the good deal available in the market or do some research that will help us to make a better decision. This is a very high energy and time consuming task. However, internet is gaining popularity and more and more people research, sell and buy their property online. Because of this, there are many companies design and provide some great online tools or services in their web site. This really gives a lot of convenience to the end users like us. 

So today, I would like to gather and put all the tools in one article here. So this can be one of your real estate references in future. Please don’t forget to bookmark this page!

Without further ado, let’s get started!

Search Your Property

Due to the popularity of internet and high demands, some real estate sites appear as a trend in the internet. This site can let you buy and sell your property online. Some of them even can help you by pass those local real estate agents and help you save some money in the process of property buying and selling properties.

Bidsell.com – This is a real estate market place. Their motto is “Owners list them – Buyers bid on them”. You can search the deal available on the site and bid on those you think is good deal. Besides that you also can sell your property here and get the highest selling price through bidding.

Zillow.com – This is a real estate property search engine where you can search property on sale easily. You just key in the city & state or ZIP code and you can get the properties information and show the data in a map and list. The new feature of Zillow is “Make Me Move” where you can buy a property that not really on sale by offering the owner a good price and make them sell the property to you.

Trulia.com – This is a competitor to Zillow and is another option for you to search your first deal. Just like Zillow, you key the relevant information such as price range, property type and other requirement, Trulia will search the properties accordingly One of the features that I would like to recommend you is Trulia.com’s Heat Maps which offer a visual view of local home price trends. Besides that you also can subscribe to the RSS of your searching and keep updated with the new information easily.

Redfin.com – this is another great tool for you to look for a property deal. Buying with redfin is very easy. You can give a tour to the houses with redfin or on your own. Draft an offer online and Redfin will handle all the procedure after that such as negotiation and closing. This really can save you a lot of time. However, at this moment, redfin only provides service to certain area only such as Boston and L.A.

Property’s Value Estimation Tools

If you ever see and find a good property before, you will wish to know the value of the property. You can ask your real estate agent, appraisals or bankers to find out this information. This is another very time consuming task. However, today, the story is different. There are some free tools on the internet can do this job for you. You will know the value without making any calls and the best thing is - you can just sit in front of the computer.

Real Estate ABC Value – This is a property value search engine. They claim that real estate ABC can give you the power to search on a subject property, compare recent comps and compare to city averages. Overall this tool is not bad as it comes with the comparison feature.

Yahoo Home Values tool – Another great tool from Yahoo. I have nothing to say about these tools but let you try this yourself.

Eppraisal – Eppraisal provides home valuation service along with information about homes recently sold in your neighborhood. Eppraisal even provides more with mobile and professional services. You can get home valuation information through your mobile phone or request some experts to do the valuation for you.

Rentometer – I think this really a great tool. This tool can help you to check the rental market of your area. After you key in your rental address and relevant information, the system will analyze your area and listed several rental properties around your area on the Google Map. From here you can compare the rental market accordingly.

Update:

This site was recommended by Grey. This is really a great tool. Thank you Grey!

Housefront.com – Another site like Eppraisal where you can get the property valuation through your mobile phone. Housefront will help you to keep all your search history so that you can refer back from your computer what property you have searched when you go out for deal hunting. Overall this is a great tool.

Looking for an agent

Real Estate agent is one of the important team members in your investment team. They can help you by providing professional information and also experience which can save you a lot of research time. So I introduce 2 sites for you to find a good and reputable real estate agent by looking at their testimonials and recent business activities.

HomeThinking.com – This is a pretty straight forward site that provides services to help home owners choose the most remarkable real estate agent. They measure the performance of agents by monitoring the real estate transaction they made, for how much and how long on leverage. Besides that you also can read the customers reviews on particular agent to know their reputation.

Incredibleagents.com – As its name indicated, this site can help you to find an incredible agent for your investment. In this site, you will read a lot of information about agent’s profiles and the reviews from old customers. Personally, I think you can read a lot of great reviews over agents here.

Renting Out Your Property

Renting out your rental property is another challenge for a real estate investor. You have to know the marketing skills in order to rent out your property faster to the targeted customers. If you are looking for some communities that full of targeted customers, then the following sites can help you on this.

Apartments.com – In this site, you can be an advertiser to advertise your rental property to the world. First you sign up to become their advertiser and then select an ad package to expose your rental property to market.

HotPads.com – You can list your property on the market free in this site. Just type you address, City and select the state, then your property will be listed in this site. There is a free video provided by HotPads to help you on this.

RentMineOnline.com – This is a site that connects millions of owners and renters through a convenient online market place. If you go to their site, you will know that they are combining their network, members’ network and also Local rental companies’ network into a big trusted market place. If you want to rent out your property, this is a good place to get started.

TenantMarket.com – This is a search engine site that let you to search renters and landlords accordingly. The search engine is quite easy to use. Just key in the relevant information and the potential tenants will be showed on the screen. Besides that, there is a virtual assistance appears at the site to help you on how to use the their service

This is an article that I wrote and put in the “How to Invest Your Money” which is about achieve financial freedom by making more money. You can read other relevant articles over here.

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