What is the best website for finding property to buy or sell

Asks trixie

A. Estate agents are gradually getting the hang of the web, although it is often hard to find a comprehensive listing of properties in many areas outside London online that comprise those properties on offer by more than one estate agent. However, there are some good ones and they include the following:

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Property Finder

This site is really easy to navigate and boasts over 100,000 properties from 3,000 estate agents around the country. It is not focused entirely on London as some sites tend to be, and even offers properties overseas. All properties are listed with a photograph, and some even have virtual tours if you're lucky enough. You don't have to check the site all the time for new properties in your area as once you've told Property Finder what you're after they will email you with new additions and they also offer help with moving, offer advice on buying a mortgage, insurance etc.

To conduct a search all you have to do is enter your desired postcode (or town/city name if you don't know the exact postcode), state how many bedrooms you're after and the type of property e.g. flat, you want and a search is carried out with the results produced within a minute. This site also includes an online magazine called Your Mortgage, which features lots of relevant articles for home buyers including topics like house prices in 2001; buy to let mortgages explained; credit rating and how it effects your chance of getting a mortgage; and tips on how to sell your home quickly.

This is a great site that is easy to use, however when I searched for houses in the Brighton & Hove area - an area listed by the Times earlier this year as one of the most expensive (many properties have seen their value soar, adding up to 80% on the value of the property when compared to prices two years ago) it had no listed properties to show me.

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Home Pages

This is another good site that offers a lot of add-on extras for the home-buyer. Together with its property search facility it offers mortgage quotes, a moving checklist, buyers and sellers guides, market news and household insurance. This site also has a great help page, which is worth checking out as it tells you how to use the site quickly and efficiently. It also offers links to online solicitors, surveyors, removal firms and insurance companies. Its property search facility is quite broad, instead of being able to search under Brighton & Hove on this site I had to choose from a list of counties and once I chose East Sussex it gave me ten results in the price range I selected (�250K, the average price for a three bedroom house in this area) in the whole county, not listed by town, none of which was close enough for me to consider.

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Find a Property

This website has a strong home-counties/London bias as it allows you to search within the following categories: London (north of river); London (south of river), Surrey & Middlesex; Berks, Bucks, Herts and Essex; Hants, Sussex and Kent; rest of UK, rest of Europe; and rest of the world. It boasts a modest 32,330 houses and flats for sale from 953 estate agents, however as I was searching for properties in one of its core areas I was in luck - it returned 85 possible houses in Brighton and 40 in Hove in the price range I selected. All properties were listed in price order (cheapest first) and you can book viewings of any properties you like the look of online. Highlights of this site include its in-depth features, some of which include the following: prestige homes, new homes and residential developments; waterside properties, buy to let investments; how to buy a house at auction; why you should have a property surveyed, how to rent your property and Cedar House Rules (new contemporary and affordable design-led housing projects).

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Fish 4 Homes

This site - one of many Fish 4 sites - boasts an enormous database of 265,604 properties to sell online (none of which listed a house in Brighton & Hove around the �250K mark - although it is updated daily). It also offers a brilliant guide to buying or selling a property; estate agents (with a complete directory), mortgages and conveyancing, neighbourhood reports, insurance, moving and the legal aspects of buying property.

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Up My Street

As well as featuring desirable properties for sale (it listed an amazing 119,808 properties in Hove, not all houses, in conjunction with Asserta Home) this site acts as a virtual guide to everything going on in the area you choose to search for a property in. It features a guide to property prices, a what's on entertainment guide, local council performance, council tax bands and rates, education and schooling, policing and crime, plus lots more local information.

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Other good sites include the following:

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Prime Location

This site covers the entire UK well, is very easy to navigate and provides a local guide to the area you choose.

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Hot Property

Focuses on London and the Home Counties, and is the online version of the free weekly magazine available in these areas. Has a great DIY section that guides you around your home giving handy tips on how to do it up. By far its best feature, however is its jargon buster - that translates estate-agent speak into common English.

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The Right Move

This is another great site that is easy to navigate; it has the added bonus of letting you know how long a property has been on the market.

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Asserta Home

This site is very well known and considered one of the best on the market.

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UK Property Gold

This site is very no frills, but the site to check out if you're looking to buy a flat - especially a new one in an apartment complex - as it has thousands of them across the country.

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By Karen Anderson