Look online for residential real estate in RSA

If you are looking to own real estate in Johannesburg of South Africa. I would prefer to buy or rent in a large city because that is where you can have a good lifestyle. I wonder: "How do I go about looking for a house?" The solution of course can be easy and hard simultaneously.

Begin by having a reasonably clear idea of the investment you are looking to make, and how much money you can spend. In my case I decided to look for a small house either to lease or to purchase. If I was going to enter into a leas I would not want to spend more than Eight Thousand per month and if I were to buy I needed a house that did not cost more than R950 000. I made up my mind on what I could buy because I only have the equivalent of 20% of of the house price to put down as a deposit. Whilst lenders might give you the money, even if you can put down less than that I did not want to consider it because of the risks of overreaching - after all we all know what happened with the loose lending practices in America!

After this you need to make a list of the features that are important to both you and your partner and take the time to know you can't compromise on. My wife and I made up our minds that we were particular in terms of what we wanted and we also wanted to avoid certain features. By way of example we wanted a newish house preferably built in the 1970's and it had to be timber. We also needed a back-yard for our dog "bulla", a modern kitchen, additional room for our aging parents, a fairly practical lay-out, and for me the guests spot was important - I simply would not survive if I couldn't have friends over for a braai. We wanted to avoid certain features such as poor road access, a a tiny house, and bad neighbourhoods where there were thefts.

Once you knew what you wanted we had to make a decision about where to look and the possibilites were endless. When I spoke with my mom about this they said to try the weekend classifieds such as the Star, to buddy up some 'buyers agents' and to speak with my friends since they might have ideas. The weekend newspapers were didn't help for this because they had didn't tell me what I needed to know about the houses. My friends were very helpful and told me that these days the internet had overtaken print media and that I had to try out the search engines to find what I was looking for. I decided to try out Yahoo using the following search terms: Property Johannesburg. These search results gave me a lot of options including real estate websites, well seller's agents and even some free classifieds sites. After spending some time with each of these I decided that I liked "privateproperty.co.za".

The immovableproperty.co.za website resembled a more traditional form of classifieds. I could instantaneously navigate to the major cities of Johannesburg (the default option), Cape Town and Durban and the listings were arranged in terms of date. This helped me to immediately find the latest listing because there is nothing as frustrating as finding something that you really like only to cal the owner and hear that it has been sold. The Johannesburg listings included houses in "NorthCliff etc. I decided on the Greenhills property and was not disappointed. I could tell from the photo that the place was well built. I noted the agent's details, and sent an email via the online form. I received a call later on and am off to meet the seller of the house.

The privateproperty.co.za website looked great. The site is very well laid out and helped me look at properties all over quickly. The listed properties also had detailed descriptions and 360 degree YouTube Videos so I didn't have to go and look. The search options also allowed me to narrow down the listings in terms of price, bedrooms and a host of other features. It is easy to understand why this site boast to be one of the busiest in its class and it did not disappoint me.

The last site I looked at was myproperty.co.za. Whilst this site did not look very modern it had an easy to use navigation and lots of information. Most of the listings appeared to be from agents and not private sellers but I could not be sure. I really liked this site and feel that it should be part of any prospective buyer's overall strategy.