Finding the Right House - Part III: Realtor.com

I love Realtor.com. While it's not always up to date, it certainly gives you a great idea of what kind of house you can buy in your price range for any given area.

I searched many areas within 30 or so miles from Buffalo Grove. That helped me narrow down the areas we would have the Realtor look into.

We couldn't look to the East because it gets more expensive the further East you go. We weren't interested in going South because to get a really nice place for the money you'd have to go to like Sugar Grove or Oswego. So we looked as far North as Antioch and as far West as Woodstock and Huntley.

Some of the areas we were looking in included... Gurnee, Lindenhurst, Lake Villa, the many Round Lakes, Grayslake, Mundelein, Cary, Crystal Lake, Woodstock, McHenry, Hainesville, Lakemoor, and Wonder Lake.

Gurnee was pretty simple to rule out. All of the houses in our price range were close to Waukegan. Which if you know the area... isn't a good thing. That sucks because a couple years ago we saw several houses in our price range that would have really been nice.

Mundelein was ruled out because all of the houses in our price range were 40-50+ years old. We wanted something newer.

We found a couple good houses in Woodstock in the same subdivision that Barry, a guy in my office recently moved to. We wanted to check out those in person.

Other than that, the other areas had some decent places and they were worth including when we handed the search off to our Realtor.

Back to Part II --- On to Part IV