The Best Sites to Search Tucson Homes Online

tucson real estate and mls listing searches It’s a rare week when I don’t have several inquiries from buyers searching online for a home, asking questions about a property and wanting more details.  I’m amazed how many times I look up a home, only to find it no longer listed, sold, or otherwise taken by some other buyer.

So what is the savvy online home buyer to do?  Stick with quality sites, and you’ll get far.

Side Note: Why am I telling you about other MLS searches?  Looking for homes online is such a small part of a real estate transaction, that it doesn’t matter on what site you find the home; what matters is who you select to represent you through the other 98% of the process of buying a home.

Let’s start with my personal favorite…

Housechick.com

  • The best feature here is the tight map integration, and the simple interface. You can search by house amenities and area of town, and all the results are shown together on the map. It really puts a good context to where the houses you like are located. I’m working on a new search that will make some very cool improvments, keep an eye out for it. 
  • Housechick.com displays everything in the Tucson MLS system, and is updated twice a day.  All pictures provided by MLS are displayed.

Big Brokerage Sites

  • The Big Brokerage sites have a variety of ways to search the Tucson MLS. 
  • The Long Realty home search allows the user to search by map, MLS number, area, or general home amenities.  I find the map search a wee bit confusing at first, but full detail and pictures are given in the results.  You can also see the status of a house, whether it is under contract, or still Active.  The site contains everything in the Tucson MLS and is updated several times per day.
  • The Coldwell Banker site allows you to search by address, map, MLS number, or general amenities.  The national site shows only Coldwell Banker listings, at least in Tucson as far as I can tell, which makes it pretty useless.  Luckily, the local site is better, looks like it includes the complete MLS, with a full featured search either by amenity or by map.  The only thing I miss here is searching by defined MLS area, and seeing all the homes on a single map.
  • The Prudential National site makes me register before I can search through the homes.  Bye bye.  Why ever register for information when I can find four hundred other sites that will give me all of the information for free?  The local site has a decent search, but makes me choose between “basic” and the “full detail” and again I must register to get any good details.

Help-U-Sell

  • An annoying quirk, the search results here are displayed all Help-U-Sell listings first, then the regular MLS listings.  You can change that option, but that display order is the default.  I think it’s funny that the Help-U-Sell search looks like the same platform as Long Realty’s search, with the same odd map interface - although the Long Realty site has more search criteria available.

Realtor.com

  • The search here is fairly intuitive, but not all pictures are shown.  Agents must pay extra to have more than one photo shown for their listings.  Why use a site that won’t give you all the pictures, all the time?  Moving on.

Classified Sites

  • craigslist can be a good way to find the stray For Sale By Owner that hasn’t found a way to list their home in the Tucson MLS.  Probably not the best place to look as a serious home buyer, as information may be outdated.  craigslist is becoming flooded with real estate agent listings, with the proliferation of simple programs that place listings into craigslist automatically.
  • Yahoo Real Estate is partnered with Prudential, and I’m asked to register to see all the photos.  That’s a big turn-off.
  • Google Base has made a foray into posting real estate listings.  I don’t see any subscriptions from brokerages in Tucson yet to push their listings to the site, but Google being Google, I’m sure they’ll have all of that soon.  It doesn’t appear that this site will accept an MLS feed, but it’s an interesting search and map, for now.

Tucson Multiple Listing Service

  • The public has a limited search of the Tucson MLS system directly.  There’s no map search, but you can search by address, MLS number, or general property amenities.  Not every criteria searchable by agents is available to the public in the search, but a good portion is included.  All the details and pictures are shown for the individual properties, as well as the status: whether the property is Active, Active Contingent, or Active CAPA.  The navigation is a little odd, you have to use the browser back button to get off of the listing detail page.

So there you go.  That’s the overview of the big listing search sites for Tucson real estate.

Disclaimer: Every brokerage has the option to not allow their listings to appear on internet sites.  In this article, a full MLS display is only those listings that the brokerage has allowed internet sites.  This is the vast majority of the Tucson MLS listings.

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