From years of helping buyer clients search for homes you develop a sense for what works and what doesn’t. As part of my business, I have always encouraged my clients to conduct their own online home searches to supplement the listings I send. I tend to feel that the #1 expert on which home is best for my buyers is: (as you probably guessed) the buyers themselves. But you all need my advice and experience when it comes to the transaction. What I’ve found from talking with many of my clients about their own home searches can help you avoid mistakes if you’re doing some searching yourself. Here are the top 5 biggest mistakes buyers make when searching for homes online and my suggestions on how to avoid them:

1) Using Sites that Don’t Update Regularly: most of the websites that allow you to conduct your own home searches get their information from the MLS. The MLS makes updated information available several times daily, yet it is the responsibility of the website owners to keep their site up to date. Some websites, like my own Illinois Home Search update the data daily – that means new listings that are in the MLS show up on my website that day or the next and homes that are off the market, under contract or sold are quickly removed or flagged. However, there are quite a few big-name websites that update data perhaps once a month and sometimes longer! Surprisingly, in many cases, individual agent websites like this one are often more up-to-date than the big search sites. Because an agent focuses only on one region, it’s much easier to keep the data updated regularly than for a huge search site that has to coordinate updates from hundreds of different MLSes all over the country. If you do happen to get roped into using one of the large, slow-updating sites, there are a few problems you’ll face. First, those juicy real estate deals that everyone is looking for will likely already be under contract by the time you see them on those sites. Second, you’re going to waste a lot of time finding the perfect homes only to learn when you try and set up showings that those homes went under contract long ago and just haven’t been updated. Whichever site you decide to use to do your searching, you have to make sure that it’s kept updated. I’m not going to name names of the bad websites here, so how will you know? Well, if you’re looking for a search that’s kept up to date you can always try mine at: http://www.illinoislandandhomes.com/real_estate_search.