Google Maps

Posted by Jason Steele

In searching for a new place to live, my wife and I had a number of factors that were important to us aside from the obvious: price, taxes, lot size and beds/baths.  The top three for us are schools, work commute and accessibility of public transportation.

We have children who aren’t of school age yet, but being in an area with a strong school district is important to us.  So, like the web geek I am, I turned to Google to search for local school ratings sites and it pointed me to GreatSchools.net.  This site is an amazing resource for comprehensive profiles with ratings for more than 120,000 schools nationwide and also includes unbiased parent reviews.

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Posted by Jason Steele

As you may know from my last blog post, my family and I are in the market for a new home. I began the research process of finding an agent both on the web via Active Rain and through local referrals from friends and family in our prospective neighborhoods. We chose the agent through active rain as they happened to be much more knowledgeable and in tune with our requirements for finding a new home. The agent set up an automated email from their local MLS that would send us listings as they hit the market. In addition I went to Realtor.com, Zillow & Trulia daily just to make sure I had all of the bases covered so that the perfect house wouldn’t fall through the cracks. About a week ago a very promising home hit the market in our price range and it just seemed too good to be true. The pictures on the MLS site were plentiful, good school system, taxes were in line with our expectations and most of the all the price seemed low for the amount of property/beds/baths. There wasn’t an address listed so I went off to Trulia to see if I could figure out where in the town this home was located and sure enough there was an address. The default view is “map” and the location appeared to be ideal as it bordered a large wooded area. I zoomed in a bit and then hit the “satellite” view and that’s when things really came into focus. There appeared to be a building with 4 large round towers no more than 50 yards behind the woods in the rear of the property.

My first assumption was some sort of water treatment facility so I threw a search into Google Maps and it turns out I was pretty close, but it wasn’t water — it was sewage. After seeing Erin Brokovich I decided to pass on this house, but it got me thinking that 5 years ago I may have put an offer on it.

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