Tools for housing search in US

Real estate have been a hot market for quite a while even though there are lots of woe that housing bubble is going to blow. There are regions that housing price did in fact declined, however, there are others where the housing price is still moving upward trend. I'm one of many people out there who would like to own my own "BIG" home one day. Naturally, I accumulated these reference and search sites for couple months without actually seriously looking... I really should...

In any case, I wanted to share this with the reader to save them time trying to find what they need or want. Working with real-estate agent is one thing but doing your own search can help getting what you want for the right price.

First useful site I would like to recommend is housing maps site. This site provide geological map and the listed site information extracted from the famous craigslist site.

Second site is called Zillow, where you can browse and even get estimated value pricing of the neighbors as well as search for active houses in the market.

Third site is from the Google Base where it gathers real-estate information from the web and put them along with the usage of the google map features. Still at beta but still quite useful to get more info on houses on the market.

Last but not least is Ziprealty site. Similar to other three sites, ziprealty provides useful local housing listings as well as local real-estate agent contacts. Not sure how good those agents would be since I have never dealt with one just yet, it can provide you starting point during your search.