Wife and I are retiring soon and we know what requirements we have for our retirement place but don’t now how to find it. It could be in a multitude of states from the Midwest to the east coast. So we need a real estate company that covers quite a few states but are having trouble locating one. Any suggestions?
Thanks,
CnCdad
Depends on the states, but maybe check out Redfin. We made heavy use of their site in 2019 and 2020. They are active in a lot of states but not all.
Coldwell Banker Realty covers almost every state.
I question the underlying premise that a real estate agent is of any use in finding the property you want. They have some use in physically visiting the properties you may be interested in after you find them yourselves using online tools. And unless they are actively incompetent, they will be useful in negotiating the deal and then closing it out.
But finding the e.g. 50 candidate properties out of the tens of thousands for sale in a multi-state area? That’s IMO 100% on you. Redfin, Zillow, etc. are far more useful than anything some real estate agent has access to.
I really think that is the best way these days to look for houses that are fairly remote. I found Zillow a little harder to filter to my liking, which is why I used and recommended Redfin.
It’s been good gosh just over 10 years now, but I was living in St. Louis MO and had accepted a job transfer to Miami FL. Which means I needed to find a place to live in a single metroplex of roughly 6 million people.
Online was great for that. Whether I was hitting the website of e.g. a Coldwell Banker branch in one or another area of Miami or hitting Zillow or the equivalent.
Any given agent has a catchment area of maybe 10x10 miles = 100 square miles where they have useful knowledge. For most it’s much smaller, maybe 5x5 = 25 square miles. Beyond that they’re as clueless about local details as you are.
I looked at a couple hundred properties online. Even more at first while my search was especially unfocussed. Then I eventually worked up a short list of a dozen and selected a local agent to show me just the dozen on a weekend trip down there. Lather rinse repeat for about 6 trips down and about 60 in-person showings. We made two offers and closed on one.
The agent gave some useful advice the first time we met with them on local rookie mistakes to avoid. But otherwise despite being a perfectly useful professional in their field there was nothing they could do to find listings that I could not do myself. And with no confusion inserting them as a middleman between me and the raw data.
At least for urban / suburban living, there is no secret stash of deals known only to local insiders. The MLS is the entire inventory of the entire market.
Residential real estate professionals are the for the most part not useful, except scheduling a showing of the houses, communicating with the counterparty realtor, scheduling inspections, repair people, etc.
The last 4 home searches and purchases I’ve done over the last 25 years the only reason I needed a realtor was to go and visit homes. The primary need for a selling realtor is to get it listed in the MLS system.
I’ve always set my own listing and offer prices. As well as found the homes I was interested in seeing.
We started by looking nationally, then narrowed down our criteria by looking up things like school ratings, weather, distance to an airport, taxes, general political climate, etc. That left us about 20 locales in 6 states. We looked at prices and the general descriptions/look of the neighborhoods online and got it down to around 10. We visited them for a day each. This narrowed it to 3. We found a realtor online in the community closest to the one we were already living in. We planned to spend a few months making visits to our target community and seeing if we found something. If not, we would get a realtor in the 2nd on our list and plan to visit for a week. It did take a few months, but we were able to find a place in the closer community. Best of luck!
ETA: Both our selling and purchasing realtors were very helpful in smoothing glitches, getting contractors on site when we couldn’t even get callbacks, and negotiating.