I’ve been house hunting for a while now, mostly keeping an eye on the market, and came across 2 very cool sites that make things a bit easier. The first is the Garden State Multiple Listing Service website. This is a portal into the MLS system of Northern New Jersey, and is a great place to start your search for a home. Back in the old days, you would have to go to a realtor to get access to the MLS info (it was published in a book), but now thanks to the internet, you can browse all the MLS listings from the comfort of your home. All the other real estate sites get their North NJ MLS listings from the very same database that you are using on this site, except they typically get nightly feeds, so you should find newly listed houses here first. The downside to this site is that the UI just plain sucks, and there is no way save a search, no less, just give you the new listings since you last searched (they should use the job search sites as a great example of how to do this).
One of the reasons they don’t make it easy for you to use this site is because they want you to get a buyer’s real estate agent. With an agent, they can setup an automated query, plus get you access to additional info, like the actual address, and not just the town. Oh, that leads me to a question, why do some MLS services list the address and some don’t? When we were house hunting in Texas, they list the address in the listing, add didn’t have to go to a realtor to get that info. This is not the case in NJ.
The other site is TaxRecords.com. With this site you can look up the owner and tax assessment information for any property in NJ. It is a great way to get relative price comparisons for a house you are interested in compared to the neighbors. You could also compare the tax assessment of your house compared to your neighbors and see if you are paying too much in real estate taxes. They recently upgraded the site, and now require you to get a login id and password, but access to the site is still free.