blonde poker forum

Hey Blonde, brain picking time again. I wanted to hear your opinions on how you go about searching for property. Im going to split it down into two sections.

Residential -
Have you search recently? How did you do it?
If you haven't searched recently? How would you go about it if you had to?

Would these answers be different now to they would have been 5/10/20 years ago?

Commercial - ( this is the area im really looking at)
How would you/have you gone about your search?
Would you do it different if you were renting/buying?
Would you act differently if searching for yourself or if it was your "job" to search for a unit for a company?

If you were to associate a "property search" company with searching for commercial property, who would you go to?

I will post my answers below as to try and not influence these answers :)

So im currently searching for my own house, I started by going to Rightmove and having a look around, after picking some houses and investigating further I then went and saw local estate agents, had a chat about what im looking for and arranged some viewings. Im also now looking at auctions as ideally I want a bit of a project.

Rightmove - I find very good for "easy" searching, im sat at home watching TV and I can look for houses, I rarely go on individual estate agencies websites only if I want to really dig and find more info like when it was listed etc.
Meeting the agents - I think its key to build a rapport so they contact you if they get something good through.
Auctions - Things go cheap at auctions, sellers sometimes think they are for getting "the best price" but in reality most auctions go below market value.

Commercial - This is what I work in and im looking for the best options to go about listing our properties and where they need to be. Im not going to detail to much about this at the minute cause I like to think I have quite a lot of knowledge on the subject but what I really want/need to know is where the majority of people would go or how they would go about searching for a unit. Also whether this would differ for a 500 sqft office and say a 50000 sqft office.

Cheers for your help once again guys!

I'm not a buyer at the moment but I keep my eye out for the next step up the ladder.  I mainly use Rightmove for both residential and commercial property.  I look at their land searches in case the dream of building my own place comes up.  For land I also look at PrimeLocation, they have a land/farm search and in my mind I'd like to own a small holding one day too but in reality I may bottle that one!   

We rent a small industrial unit for work, just under 2000 sq ft.  When we moved to our current work premises (10 years ago) I found it in the local free ads.  I also looked on the council website.  These days I'd also include Rightmove of course. Associating companies with property searches?  We have Vail Williams, Strut & Parker, Page Hardy Willis plus a host of others, there's no shortage of them. 

There's also a couple of estate agents near me that run auctions which I check out.  I'm not sure they go for cheap here, things seem pretty expensive and some of them definitely go for more than market value.

Cheers graham exactly the type of things I was looking for!

Just bought a house myself recently. Right move, zoopla etc pick up most but not all of what is for sale, and they have loads that are sold or off the market you have to wade through. You should register with agents in the area you want to live and they will send you updates of what's available.

I've owned 4 different houses over the years and I think 2 or 3 of them I've found by literally just driving around in the area I plan to move to. If I see a house via an agent I will always drive to it first before booking a viewing because I think you can eliminate about 75% of them by doing that, I want to know what the area/street is like, how the house really looks, is it a busy road, what's parking like etc.

The house I just bought was through an online only agent and was not on right move etc, I just happen to chance on it when driving past whilst doing a sweep by of another house I'd seen on zoopla.

In our research as a residential EA we find that buyers use the property portals ie Rightmove, Zoopla and now On the Market but I think this will soon be   RM, On the market, Zoopla in terms of market share and potential vendors search for agents via Google inc SEO/PPC etc, word of mouth, how you look in the newspaper, your details etc

On the commercial side having recently been looking at premises whilst there are more than two commercial agents locally personally I know that the top two (imo) agents locally get the lions share of premises so I only dealt with the two of them and didnt bother with the others but on both counts I was disappointed that neither of them or their landlords invested a few ££ in a floorplan of the existing premises as in residential it is what people want to see.

I have experience in both so will attempt to give a few answers.

Residential:

Bought my first house 16/17 years ago. Was pretty much pre-internet for the market. Would first look at the weekly Property supplement in the local rags, which all the estate agents would list in.
 I also 'phoned all the estate agents and would get send details of any properties via snail mail.
Thirdly, would go round the estate agents
Would also drive around local areas.

Looked at moving around 13/14 years ago and used the internet at this stage as well as the above options. At this stage the internet was time consuming as I would have to go to each agencies website, most of which were poor to use.

Started looking at the market and trends about 4 years ago, before moving around 2 years ago. This time we only used the internet. This was rightmove, and additionally the agents own website if we found a property we were interested in, as usually the agents own website has more detail for each property.
We started registering with agents but soon knocked that on the head as all agents do is send you any old property in some shithole area you are not interested in.

Given the choice ( not that I have one) I wouldn't deal with estate agents. I find 90% of them full of shit and little more than conmen.
I would much rarther buy at auction but property in my area just doesn't come up at auction.

I always use rightmove to search for property and google street map to look at areas, which is contained within the rightmove site. Will drive around any areas I do not know.

Can see onthemarket becoming becoming more prominent because it is run by agents and pushed by them, but rightmove is so ingrained they will retain their market position imo.
For people just about to search I can see them using existing portals until onthemarket gets mass advertising.

For commercial:

When my partner was looking for sites at least 12 years ago now. We used the local property rag and the internet. There are only a couple of residential sites in my area. The biggest by far at the time was Stiles, Harold, Williams.  Ross & Co the other main provider.

She was renting so was restricted to a degree.

If I was looking nowadays, the web would be my first port of call.
For buying, I would be looking at auction as well as liaising with agents that specialise in commercial.

I suppose if it was my job to purchase commercial property I would look to work with agents more closely
Would also be contacting councils as so many properties nowadays are empty and incentives are offered