Well, here I am in the Bay Area (and up a little early by vacation day standards). Flew in last night on one of those JetBlue flights that I suspect will become a routine. JetBlue has discovered something the other airlines are picking up on: television is a fantastic sedative. No unruly passengers in need of incentivizing here. Just a TV-watching cabin full of people soothed out of their Treo- and Blackberry-withdrawal. (I finally started reading The Tipping Point on the plane, but then went and left it in the seat-back pocket. Damn.)
Anyway, we are house hunting today and generally this weekend — trying to get a feel for the neighborhoods, etc. We’ll be testing my current idea (am I completely delusional?) that my virtual house hunting on the likes of Realtor.com has given me an honest-to-goodness sense of nice areas we can afford. (Note: “afford” is a relative term in the San Francisco Bay real estate market.) With virtual tours (sometimes Java-based, sometimes Flash), neighborhood profiles, Yahoo! Smart View, e-mail watch lists, etc., real estate marketers are getting pretty good at this. Yes, it’s still cumbersome, partly because neighborhood look-ups are done by zip code — not the most natural of boundaries. Still, it’s pretty amazing how wholeheartedly realtors are embracing technology. (I’d link to Yahoo!’s great real estate channel, but it seems to be down. Hmm…)
Interesting to see that my husband’s company’s apartment (his temporary home until the house hunting comes to fruition) is outfitted with Yahoo!/SBC DSL — not to mention a fax machine, a digital camera and one of those HP “all in one” printers. Not bad. (No technology withdrawal for me!)
Later in the process, we’ll be testing just how technology-savvy these realtors are. I saw one Web site claiming to do all the contract-signing, etc. using .PDFs. Gotta like that.