Real Estate is Local

Real estate is local and so is the best information about the local real estate market. It never fails to amaze me the number of real estate websites which purport to serve the entire country. Whether they be FSBO listing services or home valuation services, they somehow always seem to fall short. Why is that? Because information is first and foremost local and trying to gain access to and use that very local information at the national level is extremely difficult.

The Open Look is attempting, on a very local level, in the Triangle area of North Carolina to really serve the local real estate market. We do this in a few of ways:

1. By serving solely the Triangle area with a free open house listing service. Anyone who wants to list an upcoming open house can do so on our site. The more the merrier. In fact, the more open houses listed, the more likely a prospective buyer is to venture out to check them out. Our site allows home buyers to view open houses that meet their criteria as well as build an open house itinerary with maps and directions. They can Click, Print, and Go!

2. By providing access to local service providers who support home buyers and home sellers. Home buyers and sellers need all types of services, ranging from legal to mortgage lending to landscaping to painting to moving to window treatment installation services. And the list goes on. We allow local service providers to post a basic listing of their services for free. If you are or know of a service provider who supports local home buyers or sellers, encourage them to post their services to our site.

3. We will soon be adding a local public resources section of the site, which will feature links to websites of local interest to prospective home buyers. Examples include municipal websites, libraries, school districts, property databases, newspapers, etc. Please let us know if you have suggestions for public links to add to the site.

Margaret Mead once said, “I was brought up to believe that the only thing worth doing was to add to the sum of accurate information in the world.”

I’ll do my small part today by shining a spotlight on Wake County’s Real Estate Data Website which provides good information about Wake County properties and recent sales data, with links to orthophotos (aerial photos) and other maps of the property. You can sort by owner name and street address. Once you are looking at a particular property data file, you can then access ownership history, date of purchase and purchase price, sales data of other properties in the same neighborhood, improvements that have been made to the property, photos, and general lot size and home size information. It’s a great information source.

The Triangle Multiple Listing Service also offers trend analysis and statistics on the Triangle real estate market. Check it out.

Have sources you rely on for your local real estate information? Let me know about them and I’ll pass the word.

Joyce Munro is co-owner, with her husband Wilson, of The Open Look a free tool to post and search open houses in Raleigh, Durham, Cary, Chapel Hill, and the Triangle area of North Carolina. They formed their company in 2006 following their inability to efficiently identify and locate open houses in the Triangle area when they relocated from Lexington, MA. They reside in Cary, NC.