Being 12 hours away from our relocation destination makes it difficult to find a home. The Internet makes it easier to narrow our viewing choices and with some fine tuning I've found a great way to narrow the house hunting options without leaving my home in Calgary.
The first choice was possibly the most difficult - Which part of the Lower Mainland is best for our Family? We needed to take commuting, schools, demographics, and the kids activities into account.
Commuting: I've heard horror stories about the commuting times in the Lower Mainland. My husband will be working in Downtown Vancouver and if my transfer goes through I will need to be central and have easy access to everywhere. The website I've found best to check on commuting traffic at any given time from anywhere is Canpages Online Directory. The traffic section of their site enabled me to map out and text different routes to my blackberry. Then whenever I wanted to I would refresh the saved routes on my phone to view the latest traffic cam photo's of each saved route. I think I'll miss my easy Calgary commute!
Schools: Finding information on the schools was easy enough. I searched each areas school board website to find out about different programs and education options. They listed the different schools and their catchment areas. Now finding a school that meets my children's needs took some phone calls. With this information we were able to eliminate some areas.
Demographics: Like most people we want to live in an area that works best for our family dynamic. For us that's an area that has kids from 5-15 years of age and adults 35-45. We want to live where other family's live and not where most of the population is either retired or in college. Stats Can's website had lots of demographic information on all the areas we were looking at.
To figure out where the kids activities were and how much driving it would take I used the Canpages online directory website. I was able to search for dance schools, gymnastics clubs, and all the other activities. The Canpages map would show all the locations with red push pins. I am very visual and unfamiliar with the areas so it was very helpful to see on the map where everything was in comparison to the areas we choose to look at. I was then able to use the listings provided by Canpages.ca to get information on the options and click through to the various businesses websites for more information. Thereby narrowing down the businesses I wanted the kids to register with. This helped us eliminate more areas and narrow our focus even more.
Most everyone buying a house in Canada knows about www.mls.ca now called Realtors.ca. This site lists every house that is listed for sale with a registered Real Estate Agency. Using their interactive Bing map we were able to see what homes were for sale in the areas we were interested in. Once we found a house that looked like a possible to view we'd check it out on Microsoft's Live Map Search, now called Bing.com. This site provided us with a photographic 360 degree bird's eye view of the property and the area. The bird's eye view is photographs taken by a plane flying in 4 different directions. We could check out how the house sat on the lot, was there access to the backyard, is there a detached shop, what did the neighbourhood look like, if their was privacy, a yard, parks nearby and how close houses were to each other. If Vancouver the City proper had been an option we could have used Canpages street view mapping feature to get a real ground level feel of each neighbourhood. The Canpages street view is a 360 degree virtual tour at street level of Vancouver, Squamish, and Whistler. Really cool. By seeing the property from above and in relation to others we were able to narrow our viewing choices down even further.
The internet has sure changed the way people can find a place to live. My mother has been a Realtor since 1991 and the method of finding a home has changed dramatically since then. We get a kick out of her old pager and old cell phone. The internet has made it logistically possible for people to view all the choices available to them. No longer is whatever an option for most people.
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