I’d probably do more of this if I didn’t get to go into actual houses as my job. (Though of course lately that is more stress than fun.) I like to go to open houses in our neighborhood, but always feel a bit guilty as I have no intention of leaving the current house.
So I’m not the only one…
I’m on Zillow and Realtor.com all the time. I look at homes in my area as well as places in the midwest where we plan to move (in 2 years). I also check out condos and coops in Manhattan (UWS and UES) in case my friends and I in the Powerball ticket pool get a winner. Dreaming is free.
I look at real estate listings almost every day. Addicted.
I also watch real estate/remodeling shows on HGTV quite often.
LOL, I love that there are so many of us!!!
It’s like the Sears Christmas Catalog for adults and it’s year around!!! 
I go through periods where I look in areas we are considering retiring too (a couple of areas in NC and Santa Fe NM have been on our list).
Then I stop and find other things to waste time on. Lately we’re thinking more about staying closer to our kids (3 between Philadelphia and Northern VA). Looking in this area is depressing ($$$$).
Your business might do better if you don’t limit yourselves just to couples who are house-hunting, lol. I think at least a third of all homebuyers are not part of a couple.
I am also guilty of this. I constantly look for potential new apartments for my daughter near where she lives, look at the homes where I live to see what my house is worth, and look at both rentals and sales for potential places for us to move to (for when we downsize hopefully sometime soon). Then I watch house hunting shows on TV also. I am addicted!
I see a lot of you use Zillow for your online house-hunting. What does it have that realtor.com and estately.com don’t? Those are the two I usually use but I’ll switch if there’s an advantage to using Zillow.
@Marilyn That house is called Real Estate Porn:)
Guilty of watching every house in a list of zip codes come and go. But I have an excuse, it is part of my job to keep track of trends and prices.
When I was growing up, my Mom used to drag us to any ‘model homes’ in the area. I still like to go to model homes because you get ideas for new trends, furniture, design. But, there haven’t been any recently, so looking online is the next best.
My mother was really into houses. We lived in four different houses when we kids were growing up, all in the same town. She loved remodeling and building new. My brother caught it from her and grew up to be a carpenter/contractor. In later life my mom and brother would buy houses together and fix them up. I mean really fix them up. Sometimes they would sell them and sometimes my parents would move into them. She was also a RE broker. She died before anything like Zillow came along but no doubt would have loved it.
Realtor is bookmarked on my computer. We even stop to go into open houses. Love, love, love looking at houses!
@patsmom , Zillow gives estimated prices for surrounding properties, including yours. If the neighboring house was for sale recently they have captured the photos from that listing.
A colleague and I had some fun trading listings for overpriced houses when our boss asked us what upgrades we needed for working from home…
I have found sometimes that houses hit one site before another. Also - please correct me if I’m wrong…For Sale By Owner houses can go on Zillow but not Realtor.com???
I will be retiring in the next few years and although we are happy where we are I have lived in suburbia my whole life, so I’m thinking about changing the channel. I’m not quite a Zillowaholic but I’m headed in that direction.
Maine (I am not a resident, but some day soon I may one of those people driving up the home prices) is such a great place.
Have you ever watched the 80’s show “Murder, She Wrote”? Some of the worst Maine accents evah.
I too follow houses and use Zillow but mostly Realtor. I currently live by an interstate and the noise is 24/7 so looking at the noise feature on Realtor is something I like. When on HGTV a buyer says, this is on a busy road or you can hear the highway, I always advise them, NOOO!
One thing I DISLIKE these days is the photos that are highly filtered/enhanced on real estate sites. Sure it makes a great photo upon first glance but some of them look fake and as a potential buyer I think I would be disappointed going in a house and seeing rooms live and not filtered!!!
A home of someone I know was recently featured by a realtor I know on the website/social media site For The Love Of Old Houses. It’s a cool house but the photos are SO enhanced that it really hides the homes flaws.
I have also seen a few listings where the pictures of the rooms have “virtual” furniture in them.
I really planned on dying in this house when I bought it 10 years ago. Now for various reasons I’m not so sure. I go in waves and haven’t looked much in a while until about a month ago, but I have looked pretty extensively recently. It depends a bit on how frustrated I am with my house (last summer) or my part of the country (this summer).
The big problem is that I have no idea what I am looking for. Probably about a 10% chance we do a major relocation in the next 2 years, and if I do that I certainly don’t want to buy another house here. If that doesn’t happen lots of different directions I could go so I skim everything. Probably my first choice would be to buy one of the neglected big old houses in the old part of town. There aren’t many of them, but when you drive through that neighborhood judging from the outside some of them probably need a lot of work inside. Currently only 2 houses in that neighborhood listed, and both are fixed up and under contract.
We actually just talked about having a realtor buddy come out here to look at the place sometime and just give us an idea of what we would get. Last summer something came up that I would have bought if we were ready to sell, but it only was on the market for a week so not enough time to get my ducks in a row here.
Probably I stay another 5 years, but at least he can tell me which things are worth fixing up and which aren’t. I’m sure we will keep updating periodically, so I want to spend money on the right things. And who knows, He owns the biggest realtor firm here, and I know he has sold houses that weren’t on the market yet. I don’t want to move next month, but for the right $$ I could be persuaded!
@abasket 100% about the enhanced photos. The pictures of my current house’s kitchen looked pretty good. I actually cried when I saw it live. It would have been better for me to have been emotionally prepared that it was going to need to go immediately than to think I could live with it for a while.