Modern househunting
So, we've been pondering buying a house.
My parents house-hunted through the newspaper - or even by talking to real-estate agents directly.
In the past, when I've been looking for a new flat, I've used trademe. Newspaper? I think we looked at it once.
What are we doing now? Well, there's still trademe, of course. I think real-estate agents realise the market dominance it has, and so they have to list their properties there, even if they list them on their own website too.
Google Maps also does real-estate, pulling information from a number of different sites. Vastly more convenient for browsing than trademe, because I can easily see where the houses are and do an instant reject if I don't like the location.
Google Earth is the next component. Turn on the "sun" layer, and you can see how much sunlight a prospective site gets at any time of the day. Neat. Also for sunlight, NIWA have a site that will show you the sun for any address in New Zealand: http://solarview.niwa.co.nz/ It's intended to let people evaluate solar panels for their house, but the benefits for would-be buyers are obvious.
(there used to be a website that would pull real-estate data from Google Maps and format it for Google Earth, but the site has been down for the past couple of weeks :-( )
If we were in Christchurch, we could even look at thermal imagery of the city (zoom in, and then check the tick box on the right) to see how energy-efficient our prospective purchase is.
My parents house-hunted through the newspaper - or even by talking to real-estate agents directly.
In the past, when I've been looking for a new flat, I've used trademe. Newspaper? I think we looked at it once.
What are we doing now? Well, there's still trademe, of course. I think real-estate agents realise the market dominance it has, and so they have to list their properties there, even if they list them on their own website too.
Google Maps also does real-estate, pulling information from a number of different sites. Vastly more convenient for browsing than trademe, because I can easily see where the houses are and do an instant reject if I don't like the location.
Google Earth is the next component. Turn on the "sun" layer, and you can see how much sunlight a prospective site gets at any time of the day. Neat. Also for sunlight, NIWA have a site that will show you the sun for any address in New Zealand: http://solarview.niwa.co.nz/ It's intended to let people evaluate solar panels for their house, but the benefits for would-be buyers are obvious.
(there used to be a website that would pull real-estate data from Google Maps and format it for Google Earth, but the site has been down for the past couple of weeks :-( )
If we were in Christchurch, we could even look at thermal imagery of the city (zoom in, and then check the tick box on the right) to see how energy-efficient our prospective purchase is.