Sander Scott walks through setting up MLS alerts in Traverse City, covering filters for location, property type, price, beds, baths, and square footage. The alerts won't catch off-market or pocket listings, so working directly with an agent gets you those deals too.
Chapters
All right. So how to conduct a property search and to set up your own saved search so you get automatic alerts. So what you do is you go to sanderscott.com or livingintraverscitymichiganarea.com. If you just want to work with me, just type in sanderscott.com. It takes you right there. All right. Now, there are all different types of options to do a search. I'm going to show you the— if you're setting up kind of a permanent search for yourself, go to advanced search here. And, you know, you can set up a huge search to cover all kinds of different areas. Most of my clients are going to be going in the greater Traverse City area. So let's just For now, focus on— we're going to search within Grand Traverse County, and we know we want to be in either Traverse City or let's say Williamsburg. And right here, right here to select multiple items, hold down the Control, or if you're using a Mac, Command, and then select the multiple. You didn't see me doing that, but I was hitting Control on my PC and selected both of those. Okay, now you're going to want to tell it, are you looking for a single-family home? Are you looking for a multi-family home, multiple residences? Then I would click that box. Okay. In this case, I'm looking for both. Okay. If I have both checked or if you're just looking for land, then you would vacant land, then you would unclick that and just focus on vacant land. For the sake of this exercise, let's say we're going to go— we're searching for a single-family home. Then you want to set— my suggestion, depending on your personal circumstance, if you get any lower than, you know, really $250,000, you're probably going to get a lot of— unless you're in this market, you know, you may get homes that are listed for sale that you don't get get any land with them, like homes that are in a manufactured housing development or what is called a trailer park. So you're going to want to be thoughtful about that unless that's where you're looking. But if you want to exclude those, then, you know, let's just say I'm going to pick $350,000 and for the sake, I'll go up to $700,000. Okay. But if you— for some people, you know, they're I'll have a lot of my clients that'll say, well, we're pre-approved up to $850,000, let's say, but we don't want to spend any more than $750,000. Well, if you're pre-approved up to $850,000, I would suggest putting it to $850,000 or maybe even a little bit beyond that, because even though those are— some realtors will advise you, well, it's a waste of your time. You know, you'll— you, you know, there's a danger that you'll become attached to buying a particular house that you cannot afford. I think it's good. I never want to hide my clients from reality. So I think it's very, very good for you to get a feel for what you get for $50,000 to $100,000 more than what you can afford so that you can see it helps you get a really gauge of value in the price range that you can afford. So I would suggest kind of going a little bit beyond what you're pre-approved for just to help you understand what an extra $25,000, $50,000, $75,000 gets you, because then you'll be able to see better value in what you're looking for that's within your price range. All right. Next is minimum beds. Here, I would make the suggestion that if it would be nice I get this a lot. Yeah, you know, it'd be really great if we could have 3 bedrooms, but if you could live with 2 bedrooms, let's say you only need 2 bedrooms, but, you know, in like 3 to 4 years you'll need a 3rd bedroom. Well, if you pick 2 bedrooms, you're going to miss out on homes that maybe you could finish the basement and create a 3rd bedroom in the basement. So you're going to want to make sure that you— it's like you're trying to achieve the Goldilocks effect. You don't want to make the criteria that you're filling out way too much because then you'll be overwhelmed with the number of listings. You also don't want to narrow it too much. So you're looking for that sweet spot. So be very, very thoughtful about the parameters that you put in. So I'm going to say 2 bedrooms, how many baths? So here, make sure, you know, if I put a minimum of 2 baths, it's not going to show me anything with just 1 bath. It may not show me anything with 1.5 baths. So just be thoughtful about that. Some people don't like older homes. They don't want to screw around with them. So here you can pick, you know, on any older home, but make sure again that if there's this great old farmhouse that's been recently remodeled by a top-notch builder in the area, if you mark that you want a home that's built from 2000 on, you're not going to get that because that totally remodeled, gutted, gutted, taken down to the studs, reinforced foundation home by a licensed builder, is it's going to have an origination date of, let's say, 1920 or whatever. Well, you won't see that when you're looking, so you got to be thoughtful. I like to stick with no preference for that for most of my clients. Minimum square foot, you know, this is one that most people kind of know. I don't want anything smaller. Than, than 1,000 square feet. Let's say in this case I'm going to pick 1,500 square feet. Okay. So right now I'm limiting my search to single-family homes. I'm not going to get any vacant land notifications. I'm not going to get any notifications in the Leelanau County. Okay. Because I haven't picked Leelanau. If I wanted to add that, then I come down here, hit control and hit Leelanau County. And notice how it still shows in alphabetical order, kind of mixes Leon County cities with Grand Traverse County. So I'm going to, you know, I'm going to hit Leon County and Traverse City, Williamsburg, and let's say throw in Suttons Bay. And then I'm gonna hit search. And now it's giving me, um, a list of properties that fit that criteria. Okay. Now, if I look through these and I like this search and I want to get notifications into the future about this, I would come up here. I can refine it at this point if I want to. I can click here, go back in and change the criteria. Okay. Or I can save this search. Okay. And here you need to enter your email and telephone number in order to get those automatic notifications. The beauty of this is that you don't have to come into the website every time. You know, I've had buyer clients that have come to me after months and months and months of searching on their own. And they were— they never either set themselves up on an automatic search or they were not working with buyer's agents who set them up on automatic searches. This is something very, very useful for you to get automatic notifications because sometimes 1 or 2 days will go by without checking Zillow or Realtor.com or however it is that you're kind of searching for homes. And what can happen This is less true now than what it was 2 or 3 years ago when the market was just absolutely crazy. But even so, great, very good homes that are priced right still do not last long. What's happened? The reason why you're seeing more and more inventory on the market is because sellers have adjusted their price upwards because they've seen what the market has been doing in the last few years. So if a home is priced right, it still doesn't last very long. So you're going to want to get instant notifications. So something very, very important for you to know is that with these automatic notifications, the instant a realtor hits the go-live, having their listing go live on the MLS, that is sent out to Realtor.com, to Trulia, to Zillow, etc. And it's sent out to my website. That's all a part of what's called an IDX. Syndicated type service. So you'll get an automatic notification. So you're going to want to do that. And, you know, here you can, you can sign up and get an account on my website. Now, here's another important thing, though. Another benefit for buyers who work with me directly is that the signing up on the search on this website is going to be very, very useful and you should do it. But one thing it's not going to do do is notify you of homes that are not actively on the MLS. They're not live on the MLS. So for example, for sale by owner properties, for example, homes that have had a listing that recently expired, um, or homes that I happen to know are coming onto the market at some point, whether they're listing with me. Also, one of the things that agents do with one another is let each other know, hey, I've got— sometimes there are what's called pocket listings where sellers are open to the idea. I have actually got one right now. They're open to the idea of entertaining a buying an offer, but they're not yet at the point where they want to go through the effort of listing their home for sale. Those are more in situations where you're more likely as a buyer for a pocket listing, you're more likely to pay a premium. But sometimes when people's needs are, they just want what they want and they just want to know whenever a property is available within a certain geographic area, they want to make sure that they know about it and can act on it. So that's a very important thing, why it's also important to work with real realtors, um, with, with your preferred realtor, um, because we're all kind of connected, networked, and we know when things are happening in the area. Um, so anyway, I would encourage you to sign up for this, um, sign up, make an account on my website, and then set up that automatic search. But then in all likelihood, um, I would also then work with your— in this case, if you're signing up on my website, likely you want to work with me. You probably also want to get on my list to be notified of off-market properties as well. So if you're curious about that, I can also set up a search for you. This is not something you have to do on your own. Oftentimes it's worth a quick consultation where we either do a Zoom or a telephone call and have a quick phone call, a quick discovery session about exactly what you're looking for. And then I can set up the search in the very same way I just showed you. Sometimes it does take a conversation to really have you understand exactly what it is that you're looking for. So anyway, I think that's, that's about all I have to show you today on setting up a search on the website. And So I'll just take you— let's refine the search since there are 104 listings. And let's say I've, I've rethought this and I really don't want to go into Williamsburg anymore. We'll just limit it to Traverse City and Suttons Bay. And so we went from 104 to 94 listings. So I can also refine the search And let's just say we're going to go Traverse City and see what that does. That went down to 93 listings. So let's go back and just do Sutton's Bay. Okay, there's only one home available in Sutton's Bay right now, and there, there it is. I can refine that search. So let's look at it from— let's add back in Traverse City and let's do a map search. So here's another viewpoint here. You can see there's a home on Old Mission. You know, this gives you— and then of course, I can click this for greater detail. And again, this is why it's important to set up set up an account here. Doesn't cost you anything, but it's just something to— this is one of my listings that's current right now. And so yeah, if you have any questions about this or anything else, check out the link in the description of this video to how to set up Zoom call with me or contact me, and I'm happy to help you with this search and any other property search, whether it's on market or off market. All right, thanks a lot.
