Searching for a Home in a Specific Neighborhood has its Challenges

The other night I was on the phone with a buyer who inquired about Gold Coast houses for sale. I ran a quick search in MLSNI* for listings with Gold Coast as the subdivision and the system returned only 2 houses. The next day I ran a search of Near North Side houses (which would include the Gold Coast Neighborhood), imported the addresses into Microsoft Mappoint and discovered 21 houses in the Gold Coast priced between $2 million and $6 million.

Since I can’t depend on listing agents to always enter neighborhoods, I often use a map search which lets me draw a rectangle on a map in MLSNI to define the area I want to search. This search technique is less than perfect for neighborhoods such as the Gold Coast which have an irregular shape (see Gold Coast Map), but a significant improvement over searching by subdivision.

If you know the street coordinates that define a neighborhood (e.g. North 1000 – 1600, East 0 – 200, West 0 – 100), you can enter them in Baird & Warner’s HomeFinder System to create your own map search. Don’t count on searching just by neighborhood or subdivision.

^*Multiple Listing System of Northern Illinois