Home Business Information

Despite increasing clutter, home buyers and sellers can find HELP IN CYBERSPACE.

THERE IS NO doubt about it: The Internet has changed the home-buying and -selling experience. It is now possible to waste more time fooling around with realty Web sites than you spend looking at houses.

While there are some useful sites, cyberspace is overflowing with empty promises. Some sites that promise to link you up with a real estate agent or deliver a quote on a homeowners insurance policy just dump you into online classified ads--after you've answered pages of questions about yourself, your home and even (for an insurance quote that failed to materialize) the avoirdupois of the family pooch. Despite such clutter, a few sites are well worth a visit:

IOwn.com. This all-purpose site is the best one overall, with a broad range of useful features for buyers and sellers. IOwn is licensed as a mortgage lender or broker nationwide (except in New Jersey) and searches for loans from among 25 lenders. You can apply online free or, if you get cold feet in cyberspace, you can call a toll-free number (877-669-4696) and apply over the phone. First-timers will especially appreciate the logical arrangement of home-buying information, starting with tips for estimating how much you can afford and ways to pull together a down payment.

Want to check your credit status? You can instantly download a copy of your Experian credit report for $8. For $29.95, you can have that report--plus reports from the two other major credit bureaus--mailed to you. It's a good idea to review your reports before you apply for a mortgage so you have time to correct mistakes or close unneeded lines of credit that might cause a lender to boost your interest rate.

IOwn.com allows you to do a free search of recent sale prices in neighborhoods you're considering. Its "Find a Neighborhood" feature offers detailed reports on three local schools; the reports are free if you agree to let one of the sponsors contact you by phone or e-mail (otherwise, you'll pay $39.95). We took the free offer, but we answered "no" to questions about plans to sell or move, and were not contacted--at least not in the week after getting the report.

The site's HomeWatch service offers e-mail notification of new listings, but it draws on a database of only 600,000 homes--fewer than listings leader Realtor.com, which claims more than 1.3 million, and runner-up HomeAdvisor. com, which claims 800,000.

# posted by Medical Information : 4:29 AM