Organize and Focus your search

• Organize your search: Keep copies of the homes you like in one central location (you can save favorite properties under your userid on this website). This will allow you to follow up and track your progress as you get questions answered and get closer to determining if you would like to schedule a visit to the home. Always keep track of things like taxes, association fees, commute distances, and Mello Roos to factor into your cost for the home.

  We recommend keeping these notes here on our website under our "Saved Properties" section (you must be a registered member to access this section). We have provided a place within each saved property for your personal notes.
  

• Narrow Your Search: Each individual neighborhood and city has its own relative property values, and there are literally thousands of listings in each city. Narrowing your search to individual cities, zip codes, and neighborhoods allows you to get a relative sense of what the homes in that area are worth.

  Having a relative sense of the value in an area gives you the ability to quickly eliminate homes that don't present the right value for you. Parameters like garage requirements, bedroom requirements, bathroom requirements, and square footage requirements help even more.

  We recommend saving these search parameters so that you can constantly be reusing the same ones. It may be appropriate to keep a few different sets of search parameters if you are looking in more than one area, or for more than one type of property. Searches entered into our search engine can be saved under any name you want to use, and reused with one mouse click whenever you are ready to use them.
  

• Enlist the help of a professional: Find a good Realtor to assist you in this effort. Realtors are compensated from commissions paid by home sellers and cost buyers nothing. This provides you with a way to hire a seasoned professional worth thousands of dollars without spending a penny. In spite of the fact that they are compensated by the home seller, California law requires them to be YOUR representative/agent as long as they are not also selling the home you are planning to purchase.

  Realtors can bring very intense focus to your search. The range of tools they have available to them and the experience they provide make a tremendous difference in maximizing your own efficiency. They also tend to have extensive contacts within the industry to bring to the table in assisting you with your search and transaction(contractors, loan agents, appraisers, home inspectors, etc...).
  

• Sign up for neighborhood specific notification of New Homes: Realtors in the Inland Empire can sign you up for notification of new homes listed in this area as soon as they become available. They can focus this notification to specific Thomas Guide Grids, and can use any other search parameter you can enter into a search engine. This will get you the information SOONER than it will get to most Realtors, who at best tend to check new listings daily.