CENTURY 21 Redwood Realty has announced that it has released its third generation Redwood Home Search on c21redwood.com, expanding the reach of its “Search By School” technology throughout the D.C. area.
With home inventory at record lows in the Washington D.C. area and multiple contracts on listings once again becoming the “new normal,” one could conclude that prospective homebuyers would begin expanding their home search and shortening their list of priorities. Yet, searching for a home in their chosen school district will always be a top priority for most buyers.
New mom and active home shopper Anna Whitehead is one of those buyers. “While looking for a home in the competitive Northern Virginia region, one of the areas on which I can’t compromise is school districts,” Anna explains. One of the things that drew Anna to work with CENTURY 21 Redwood Realty was the “search by school” feature on their website, c21redwood.com. “Before finding this tool, I didn’t always understand exactly where the school boundary lines were in relation to the homes that we were considering. That made our home/school search a bit of a guessing game.”
Traditionally, real estate websites have relied on school information provided by listing brokers to populate their searches. The major problem with this approach is that many listing brokers don’t actually provide this information, which can taint search results. For example, a recent search in an area MLS that distributes listing information to and from real estate companies, revealed 2,480 actively listed homes with “Call School Board” shown as the Elementary School.
Services like Google Maps have led to increased availability of “property geocoding,” which is the process of converting addresses into geographic coordinates. In 2012, Edward Berenbaum, the president of CENTURY 21 Redwood Realty, recognized an opportunity. “I had always considered school boundaries to be the ‘holy grail’ of real estate search. Yet, as a real estate professional, I felt my industry was lacking in giving clients a way to effectively gather information on public school boundaries in one site,” Berenbaum explains. “So, in June of last year, we released a ‘Search By School’ feature using property geocoding to determine the applicable school boundary for each listed home. This initial release was limited to Arlington and Loudoun counties, but the response was overwhelmingly positive. We immediately realized we needed to expand that capability throughout the D.C. region.”
In announcing the release of its “third generation” Redwood Home Search, CENTURY 21 Redwood Realty makes it official that users can now “Search By School” throughout the Washington D.C. region. Berenbaum thinks “this is a big win for our clients.” He notes, “This search feature helps align our local, expert knowledge with our clients’ needs. Our search technology is unique in that it truly reflects how homebuyers think.” A video search tutorial is posted at http://www.c21redwood.com/buy/search-by-school-neighborhood.
For more information visit c21redwood.com or call 202.815.0925.
