Slicing and dicing your real estate search

When you’re searching for properties in a large city like New York or San Francisco, you often have a pretty good idea of what neighborhoods, streets or city blocks you (dis)like. In some areas, folks think in terms of county rather than cities when they’re looking for a place to live. Trulia has featured neighborhood searches in major cities for many months now, but our new advanced search feature lets you refine the process further.

For instance, if you’re looking for housing in Los Angeles (say, for a job at UCLA), you might want to look at West LA, Westwood or Century City. If you use our advanced search functionality, you can select all and only those neighborhoods you’re interested in, together with your price or property type criteria, and get all the properties in those neighborhoods in one place. It’s pretty handy for cities like San Francisco, where nearby neighborhoods can be very different from each other and a map-based search may not exclude areas you really don’t want to live in.

Another feature that was requested by a lot of our users is the ability to search by school district. While local regulations don’t necessarily make it possible for your children to attend the closest school to your house, location (location, location!) in or near a good school district is often a deciding factor for families looking for housing. Our advanced search lets you pick a school district near a given city and search for properties there. Our map even plots the outline of the school district you selected so you can easily visualize what areas are worth exploring if you’re driving around looking at open houses. Check out our properties in Piedmont United school district for an example.

Southern California and New York state residents might also find our county search useful: you can be city-agnostic and view all of sprawling Orange County, Westchester County, or any other county in the US.

My favorite feature is the street search. If you want to see all the units for sale on 5th avenue in New York City, just pick New York at the top of the advanced search page, enter “5th avenue” in the street box at the bottom, hit search, and voilà. The map looks especially neat, with all the markers lined up in a row near Central Park.