Local Area Index

Contact RE/MAX Beach Towne

If you have any questions or need more detailed information, please feel free to contact me via phone at 321.722.9906.

Office Location 411 Ocean Avenue,
Melbourne Beach, FL 32951

1110 Highway A1A
Satellite Beach, FL 32937
Phone: (321) 722-9906

 

Top 10 Quick Website Home Search Tips

 

      I.          SEARCH BY "AREA" - I recommend using the "By Area" search tab instead of the "By City" tab.  There are 3 main problems when searching by city. First is that Brevard is kind of weird, with probably 30% of the house in the county having a "Melbourne" postal address. Many of these are in areas that most people do not think of as "Melbourne", like Suntree, Lake Washington and Eau Gallie. The second issue is the flip side of this: popular areas like Suntree (Melbourne) and Viera (mostly Rockledge), Port St John (Cocoa) don't have matching city names.  The third issue is that when you search "By City" (name) you will only get results with a perfect match in the city name field when the property was entered by the agent.

    II.          PRICE SEARCH- this one's pretty straightforward, but I would suggest not doing "No Minimum" price searches unless you're really targeting under $25k properties. A lot of listings under $25k are old mobile homes, condos with belly up Homeowner's Associations, gutted properties & even time shares.

  III.          BUILT AFTER- also pretty straightforward, but I'll make a couple quick suggestions. You can great deals on some older homes right now, but it's helpful to remember a few realities about homes built in certain eras. Most Space Coast homes built in the 1950s/1960s were intended as starter homes for young couples coming to the area for employment at the Space Center or related industries. These homes are typically quite modest in size and amenities, and many have 1 car garages or carports. They almost always have 8 ft ceilings, and are usually on relatively small lots. Virtually all are concrete block. Homes built in the 1970s or 1980s are usually bigger, with more amenities and almost all have 1 or 2 car garages. Most are stucco, either over frame or concrete block construction.  Concrete block and stucco is often abbreviated as CBS.

  IV.          ACTIVE ONLY- this is a very important button to check if you only want to look at homes that are available today. This will filter out homes that are under contract, or contingent.

    V.          FORECLOSURE or SHORT SALE- these buttons are very handy if you want to primarily target "distressed properties".  You will notice that you cannot check BOTH short sale AND foreclosure. I will point out that if you ONLY look at foreclosures or short sales you will be missing about 1/2 of the good deals out there. In the last 6 months, 33% of our residential closings in our MLS were foreclosures, 16% were short sales and 49% were neither.

  VI.          CBS- this acronym stand for concrete block stucco construction. It is sometimes incorrectly applied to all concrete block homes. This button can be real tricky, because if you check it, you will only get results where the agent HAS CHECKED "CBS" when they do data entry into MLS. You will definitely miss quite a few this way, because agent use of this checkbox is spotty at best. Also, a lot 2 story homes are block on the bottom floor and frame upstairs.

VII.          FIXER UPPER- you have to be careful with this one. It is OK to play with, but since agents rarely check this box when entering their listing data, you're gonna miss a lot of good deals if you use this filter too much. If you want fixer-upper deals, a better technique probably is to pick the size/age of house you want and then keep pushing the price range down. Or do the opposite, choose your price and then keep pushing size and or build date up.

VIII.          WATERFRONT-  a pretty reliable search tool. Agents are more than happy to check this box when entering a listing. However, they tend to stretch reality from time to time by calling a condo oceanfront when it's in a complex that is partially oceanfront, or calling a 2 foot deep canal navigable. Double check by looking at the aerial view and map of the listing.

  IX.          DOCK- another pretty decent tool. If you want to have a boat in your backyard, you will find this  a handy tool. Two things to watch out for though. Some agents will call a community pier for fishing or sight-seeing a dock, even if you clearly can't keep your boat there. Also, some places where you can keep a boat don't have dock... yet, but easily could... others not so much. Refer to aerial mapping for clues to water depth and what neighbors have been able to do.

    X.          GARAGE- This one is bad news in a lot of cases. There are 2 issues. First- The way our MLS data is sorted a 1 car carport and 1 car garage are the same in the raw data feed. Also- agents fail to check this box a lot. I would probably only suggest using this filter a lot if you're looking for 3 car garages or more.

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