Real estate sales and promotion fits naturally onto the web. Computers are ideal at making specific information available on demand: Each property has different specific features: location, address, size in square feet, design, neighborhood attributes, bedrooms, bathrooms, offices, freeway access, schools, parking and more. Because property information is of most value a the home or building's availabity status, new details, and and comparable sales data change, the Web can give much better information than Real estate magazines or newspaper "home" sections ever could.

Because of Real Estate brokerages strong sales and profit motivations', a search engine's results are often twisted by how hard a given agent or firm worked to reach the top of the list. Purely informational sites will be harder to find than those with big incentives to earn commisions.

I am spliting the Real Estate subject into two main areas: Homebuying will continue below. We have as second page for Buisness and investment real estate resources.

I (Tom Norian, prinipal here at SA) have been an Investment Real Estate Broker since 1988 so my input comes from some experience.

Here is how I'd break down the general subject of home buying and home selling. Each area is critically important BUT the information you get from one source might be biased on the other topics.

• Are you comfortable communicating with this person.
• Are they experts in the type of property you hope to purchase?
• Are they committed to helping you full time?
• Are they well regarded by their peers in the specific market you are intersted in?
• Are they eager to answer your questions and confident to direct you to other expert sources?

More to come, but consult your local news paper real estate section. I find that a Mircosoft related map service provides a good access point for quickly getting some answers to demographic information.

Once you have settled on a community you should search far and wide and certainly consult the information that the local governments give to you.

Key Point: Counties, Cities, and Towns have tremendous amounts of information to offer you, yet they have little incentive to spend the cost and trickery to get ranked highly or to get listed on certain topic sources. If you are looking in Boston, Bethesda, or Burmingham, you'd need to use diffferent access points than in Berkeley. In California we use the word Counites, in Massechusettes they use terms like townships and eldermen. None the less, once you start honing your reserch access the local governments. I provide a US government directory site here... a FANTASTIC resource for diverse information, much of which will never be pointed out to you by commercial search engines or large "network TV" sorts of web portals.

FirstGov.gov is the US Govenrments resource directory, which also is a great tool for finding free expert advice and data from local goverments
I find it shameful that so many sources of top quality Govenrment information are burried (3/15/2005) at places that try to present themselves as sources with your best interest in mind. (see FAQ)

Still, for profit locale newspapers, tourist sites, and locale real estate firms can tell you things the Government wont...USE BOTH. My suggestion would be to use searchengines like Google, Yahoo, MicrosoftSearch, ASk.com, and Metasearch (listed in my current (3/05) perception of quality) to help you find Independant resources that will give you a feel for the community you might choose to join. The paid ads and banners at sites can express a real estate firms continued commitment and abilty to pay can be a sign of past sucess as long as YOU understand the conflicts and motivations of where you'll be directed.

Those large companies generally have a goal to gain your respect by serving you well, however conflicts from the nature of internal beraucracy and external flashy salesmen can corrupt their data, yet usually not entirely.

If you can reform your questions, and if you are willing to use the local communitiy links you find to search further, the open world wide web search is an Extremely important resource (see search drivabilty).

Let me refer you to: FirstGov.gov has all sorts of pointers to consumer advice
Other sources will follow in the future. (3/15/ 2005 )