A House A Home

So, my little family has spent the last few weeks looking for a house!  We decided to stay in vegas for a few more years after all.  After researching rentals the last few months, the thought of paying someone else's mortgage kind of irked me.  At first it was the best option for us because we had a possible transfer with my husband's job in the works.  So, we needed the flexibility.  After we put the breaks on all that though we looked to see what was for sale in the same neighborhoods as the rentals we'd been considering.  

Our searches pretty much consisted of: driving through neighborhoods to get the feel of them  and writing down the addresses of homes we liked with "for sale" signs.  Then, we'd come home and I'd look the homes up on realtor.com, zillow.com, and trulia.com  to get as much info as I could.  If we really liked a property I'd send the mls# to our realtor and go from there.  After losing a bidding war on a home we absolutely loved I was pretty bummed, but we did finally get a house!  We're just waiting and in the paperwork portion of buying a home now.

The other night I stumbled upon blockshopper.com. 

I think this is a great site for anyone shopping for a home right now.  You can enter a street name or specific address and access all kinds of useful information.  How many foreclosures are in the neighborhood?  How much did the original owner pay for this house?  How about the last owner?  How much were other homes in this neighborhood sold for and when?  All this is easily accessible at the Blockshopper site without having to register or pay or anything like that.  Pretty great.

Another handy site when deciding where to live whether you're looking to buy OR rent, especially if you have a family:

FamilyWatchdog.us is probably not the first place online you might think to go when looking for a place to live, but should be a part of your neighborhood research.  I want to know if the guy with the cute puppies that lives 3 houses down is a registered sex offender; especially now that I have a child.