Homes For Sale Websites And Tools UK

If you are looking for homes for sale, then you will find some great websites that actually help you when buying a house.

I've put together a list of my favourite - and most useful - tools for when I am looking for homes for sale.

The most useful property website in the UK is Rightmove. Rightmove has about 90% of the properties that are for sale in the UK.

rightmove.co.uk

These days, most individual estate agents will have their own website, but most house buyers probably don't go there because Rightmove has so much on it.

For a few months now, Rightmove has provided an online magazine that lists all the houses that have been reduced in price.

If you are using Firefox as your browser, then there are some add ons that you can install that make finding homes for sale a little easier. Property Bee is one of these add ins.

Property Bee: property-bee.com

Launch Firefox and go to the Property Bee website then install the software. Register and you start to share your search results with other people who are using it.

What Property Bee does is collects all the searches its users perform - and if you search for a house that's been reduced (or increased) in price, then Property Bee will show this on your screen. You can instantly see how long a property has been on the market for, any price changes and any times it's already "sold" and the deal's fallen through.

Property Bee was launched in early 2008, so any homes for sale that have been for sale longer than that will show as coming onto the market in January 2008.

Another good website for doing a spot of home buying research is Property Snake.

Property Snake was closed down. A great loss as it was entertaining.

Property snake lists all the houses that have dropped in price. It started back in 2007. Initially it got its data from Rightmove (among other websites), but then Rightmove threatened them with legal action, so it just draws the results from other websites.

Well worth a look though.

With Property Snake, simply type in the first part of the postcode to see homes for sale that have been reduced in price. Once you've got the list you can sort them by:

• %age price reduction
• by original price
• by current price
• by time on the market
• by type of homes for sale

The data on homes for sale that have been reduced in price is updated about twice a week.

In the last few years there's been a lot of new websites that enable you to look up past selling prices at zero cost. Some require you to register, some do not. Below are some of the ones I use.

Note: These were bought out, unfortunately. This handy way to see house prices and find addresses is no longer available.

I have left up how it used to work .... for nostalgia!

One easy to use site is houseprices.co.uk. You don't need to register with this website to get past selling prices for free. Simply type in the address and you'll see all the past selling prices.

You can search for any part of an address at all - and you can use wildcards. What this means is, if you want to look for the London postcode of E1, you could search for all properties in E1 where the 2nd part of the postcode begins with the number 2, simply by searching for: E1 1??

http://www.houseprices.co.uk

Here are some examples of how you can use the wildcard, although you should note that the wildcard will pick up anything that meets the criteria, e.g. searching for E1 2?? will give you all properties in the E1 2?? area -AND- any properties in the E1 region where the property number contains 3 digits and starts with a 2.... but it's a small annoyance to put up with for the sake of convenience.

http://www.houseprices.co.uk/e.php?q=e1+2%3F%3F&n=10

http://www.houseprices.co.uk/e.php?q=e1+2%3F%3F+-flat&n=100 - same as above, but notice the use of -flat, which removes any addresses that have the word flat in them

Houseprices.co.uk, when viewed in the Firefox browser, can be enhanced by using a couple of plugins called Grease Monkey and Property Chimp. Once these are installed, a new field appears and by clicking on it it will group together the past selling prices for that property and calculate if those sales were at a profit or a loss. It is one plugin (Property Chimp) but that one only works if Grease Monkey is already installed.

Installing Property Chimp is a two-part process.

First you need to find/install Grease Monkey and then Property Chimp.

1. Launch Firefox
2. Go to addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748 to install Grease Monkey.
3. Next, go to userscripts.org/scripts/show/31220 to install Property Chimp

Now, when you go to houseprices.co.uk in Firefox, you can see all the sales grouped together... but also in date order still.

Another great website to use for homes for sale is Globrix.  This one works best in Firefox as the technology that runs it sometimes doesn't work on older versions of IE.

http://www.globrix.com

What's nice about Globrix is that you can just keep scrolling down the page, there is no "next" button taking you to another page, you simply keep scrolling.

If you register with Globrix then you can click on a delete icon by each property, which will remove it from what you see, enabling you to only see the homes for sale that are catching your eye.

Since I first wrote this article about websites handy for information when you are buying, two of the largest websites have started providing sold prices:

Rightmove.co.uk

Zoopla.co.uk

Rightmove

See the house prices page from the top menu - you can see thumbnails of all the houses, which is handy

Zoopla

This shows you past sales particulars and dates, as well as giving an indication of house price movements and averages.

Below are some other websites that you might find handy when looking for homes for sale.

http://mouseprice.co.uk - average selling prices, average wages to house prices ratio, area guides

http://www.uklocalarea.com/index.php - check an area for crime stats, school results and quality of life

http://neighbourhood.statistics.gov.uk/ - official neighbourhood stats from the Statistics Office

There are a number of websites where people advertise their house for sale privately. Here are a few:

 If you're looking for homes for sale, then don't forget to check out auction websites too.  There are a lot of homes for sale these days that will appear in auctions because the owners just need to sell them as quickly and easily as possible.  Some are ready to move into.

Make sure you do your research if you are looking for homes for sale at auctions, because the reason they haven't sold before might be because there are structural or serious other problems - but if you do your research, then you can find some homes for sale that are absolutely fine and the seller just wants a quick sale.

You can buy homes for sale below market value, called BMV, if you're lucky.

• Don't assume an auction property is a dud
• Don't assume an auction property is perfect

They can be either of these, or somewhere in the middle!

 If you're researching homes for sale, then you'll be  interested to know that even though you can look up the prices of houses sold in the UK, these lists aren't complete.  They won't show you the prices of houses sold at auctions.

What you can do is to check out local auctions to see if a house you're interested in was previously sold at auction... or maybe see what is for auction in your local area.

Here is a list of UK property auction websites: http://hubpages.com/_morehubs/hub/List-of-Property-Auction-Websites

I'm always looking out for great new resources, so if you've got a favourtie site, or great tool, let everybody know about it and leave a comment!

Thanks!