Jun

12

Finding A Place To Retire – Yahoo Real Estate

Posted by cameron

June 12, 2007 |

Anyone looking at this site before knows we have been exploring North Carolina as a possible retirement location. Nothing beats visiting an area to get the feel of a place and locating the areas you may want to live. We have driven all over the mountains of North Carolina and came down to Northern Asheville and nearby locations.

On this last trip we also took in some real estate to get an idea of house prices by seeing locations, surroundings and the value. You can’t get that on the Internet. In our case, we were looking to downsize but not lower our standard of living. So smaller did not mean starting over. What we found in Northern Asheville was a beautiful location that would provide the kind of life we want but at substantially higher house prices. To get some idea of the difference, I would be selling a beautiful 4 bedroom home in a desirable part of the town I live and buying the equivalent here of a starter home. Perhaps a small 3 bedroom brick ranch that you see all over the Midwest. This was not going to happen. So we have now closed the book on North Carolina and will find something closer to home.

On arriving home I wondered if there were any online tools that would have been useful in getting a better “heads up” on home values other than real estate sales sites. I have found that at Yahoo Real Estate. You can check it out here. Click on the “Home Values” tab and here you can enter your own home address or the City where you are interested in moving to under the search tab. The most informative piece of information is the price per square foot of living space. Now I know the location I was interested in it is easier to make a real comparison. For example, when I looked up the value of my own home it came up with $100 per square foot in my location. In the area I was interested in the price was about $200 square feet. That was in rough agreement with our observation at the scene. Of course not all square footage is equal but it is still a good first approximation to the truth. It doesn’t beat actually being there but as another tool in the search it is excellent.


Comments

1 Comment so far

  1. gmack on June 12, 2007 10:50 pm

    good stuff. I didnt know about this one.

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