Buying a home out of State - House Hunting on the Web - YouTube

Virtual home-buying is becoming more and more popular. Especially with what's

going on in the world today. Here in 2020 there are lots of great websites and

apps to find homes but in this video I'm going to share with you three different

sources online that are great for researching your home whether you're

sitting on your couch a mile away or in another state. So the first website is

great.schools.org and whether you have kids or not it's really important to

have a home in a good school district because that reflects on home values.

So great.schools.org is a website that allows you to rate different schools and

compare them on different metric. Let's go ahead to the website and check it out. So here on the home page you can do a search by school address or even

selecting state. Let's start with the state I'm going to come back to the

address one a little bit later. So we pull up state and it's going to pull up

a few different schools. We can scroll down and see others but let's just take

a look at what they give you here. So they give you rankings, reviews, here's

the school and what district it is in and you'll notice this says elementary

district. So something unique about Arizona compared to some other states is

that not all of our districts go from K through 12 which we call a Unified School

District. Many of them are K through 8 that feed into other high school

districts that will handle the grades 9 through 12. So again let's go back to

this we're going to check on the district information.

So when you pull up the district information it's going to give you

schools within the district and that way you can compare the schools within the

district. You'll see all this over here to schools, academics, academic progress,

and lots of other great information. Now let's head back and type in an actual

address of a property that is on the market. I've already done that so

here's the property right here and the school that's closest to it and in fact

the school that serves this property is Verado Heritage Elementary School which

is actually a K through 8 school right now it gives you some information on

there as well but what you'll see over here the high school is correct

but it has two other schools within the district that are not within the

boundary of this school. Now I will tell you whenever you're checking out schools

and you're relying on third party information, whether it's greatschools .org or even the information that the homeowner put on the Multiple Listing

Service for the listing, you don't want to rely on that information you want to

go to the schools information and we're going to do that. So this is a website

where you can check out different districts within Arizona and it will

take you to the district. So let's go to the district page and then you can check

out boundary maps. So we'll go to the boundary map and you'll see this is the

area. Now this is kind of hard to tell where all these boundaries are so I can

tell you though that this does verify that that home is within the boundary of

Verrado Heritage Elementary School and middle school. It is a K -8 ht

school as I've said before. I still recommend that you want to call the

district and give them the address of the property. The reason being, is

even if you have this information these boundaries change number one by next

year they may be planning on redrawing the boundaries so you might want to

check on if there's any plans for changing the boundaries. The other thing

is some of the schools are reaching capacity and if

that's the case the kids may end up going to one of the other schools. So

those are things that you can only check on by going directly to the district and

asking that question. So the second website I want to share

with you is Google Maps and Google Maps is for so much more than just getting

directions. You can go online and get satellite imagery, 3d images and street

views. So it's really helpful when you're checking out the property and the

surrounding neighborhood. You can also use Google Maps to determine what your

drive times might be to work and to schools and other things from the

potential home that you like. What's nice about the desktop version is you

can actually put in a date and time to see what the commute might be to work in

the morning and on the way back for example. So let's go over to the Google

Maps website and check it out. So we're going to look at a home that's

actually on the market and you can look at the satellite image here and we're

gonna go ahead and we're gonna zoom in on that so it's really nice because it

really gives you a good idea of what's in the area you can see that this house

has a little green belt with a walkway next to it it also is an alley so your

garage comes in from the alley and it gives you an idea of the yard size and

these homes have a much smaller yard than some of the other homes. This one's

a little tricky to see because they don't have any grass back there like

this one does so it almost looks like that's the roofline. We'll scan back out

and you can see we've got a school here we've got nearby parks and you can just

get a general idea of what's in the area. You can also check it out in 3d. So let's

zoom back in on that.

So there's the 3d feature and it gives you a little bit better feel for

everything. The next thing you can do is you can go to the street view and this

is real nice again you can see the greenbelt there. The look and feel of the

neighborhood not a lot of cars on the street on this one. Of course you've got

to keep in mind that some of these Google Maps are older and sometimes

you'll see vacant lots where something now exists. So you can take a drive down

the street using Google Maps let's go down to this park here and see what it

looks like. I'm just going to zoom ahead here.

Now we're gonna go and take a look at how long it takes to get to places. So

this is a great way to check out your commute times to work. In this example

I've got Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport and the default setting is leave now which

we're in the middle of the day right now so that's only 31 minutes but you'll see

here you can put in different times. So let's take a look at that. Alright for

example, if you leave on a Wednesday during rush hour now your commute is

typically going to be 50 minutes to an hour and 30 minutes. You can play

around with this, you can switch it around if you want to know the commute

back home. You can do all kinds of things with it. So Google Maps really has a

lot of great features especially on the website that you can use to check out

the home you're interested in and the area that you're interested in. So my

third site is more of a document link than it is a website and it's the

Arizona Home Buyers Guide. This is a guide that's put out by the Arizona

Association of Realtors and probably every state has something similar. Your

Realtor can give you a copy of the document or provide you a link and you

can also google it to find it online. The Home buyers Guide is something that

every homebuyer should check out before they buy a home but it's also something

to keep as a reference and to go back to during the process of buying a home. So

let's check it out. So the Buyer Advisory is a form put out by the Arizona

Association of Realtors and it really is like a Bible for buying a home in

Arizona. It's got some great information in there for you including common

documents that are involved in the purchase of a home here in Arizona, what

to investigate on the property and surrounding areas,

and it also gives you lots of great resources and clickable links for other

websites. So if you want to find out about homeowners information, homeowners

association information for example you can find out more about home owners

association disclosures by clicking on the links here. You can find out about

issues like lead based paint and there's clickable links. There termites

great links for swimming pool information including safety information

and much much more. So those are three of my favorite online resources for

homebuyers when they're researching a home and a neighborhood if you want more

information on home buying then check out these other videos over here

I'm Amy Hayslett. Thanks for joining me and I'll see you on the next video.

Bye-bye!