Big-Picture Sites Most Helpful for Online Browsing

With prices falling, I've been thinking about buying a rental house. Like every other home buyer, I've seen the number of "for sale" signs increasing as the number of foreclosures multiplies.

More than 80 percent of home buyers start their search for a house on the Web. They will tap into an average of seven Web sites and search among them to find what they're looking for.

The big real estate Web sites would prefer that you simply choose one and be done with it. From a business perspective, that makes sense. The site that captures the most visitors and provides the most leads to real estate agents will be the site that gets the biggest payoff.

But while researching homes for sale in my neighborhood across the major Web sites, I have discovered that no matter how far real estate Web sites have come, there's still a long way to go when it comes to providing complete information on buying, financing and moving into a house.

I tapped into three of the biggest real estate Web sites to see how they compare in terms of the depth of listings.

Zillow, which started as a place to find out how much your house was worth (what it calls a Zestimate), has blossomed into a bulletin board for real estate for sale. The day I searched, there were 135 homes listed for sale in my neighborhood, most of which had been posted by big real estate brokerage companies, including Coldwell Banker, Baird & Warner and Prudential Real Estate.

The least expensive residential property (a two-bedroom, two-bath condo) was listed for $235,000. The most expensive was an enormous mansion built in the 1930s, listed for $9.9 million.

Next up, I tapped into Trulia, a real estate site that offers statistics and trends, as well as a forum for local "voices" who answer questions. Trulia also allows you to search by keyword, which is helpful in some situations.

After I entered my search requirements, Trulia came back with 167 listings in my Zip code. The least expensive property in the area I'm interested in was a two-bedroom, one-bath property listed for $179,000. The most expensive property was a nine-bedroom, 10 1/2 -bath estate listed for $10.9 million. The second-most-expensive property was the 1930s mansion listed at Zillow for $9.9 million.

As a side note, Trulia also came back with a 1,450-square-foot commercial/investment condo in a multi-use building within the search area. There weren't any photos, nor did the listing agent take Trulia up on its offer to "brand" the listing with the agent's phone or contact information. The listing seemed oddly placed next to the single-family houses, but it was interesting to know it was there.

I also liked seeing the foreclosure listings in my neighborhood, the result of a partnership arrangement with RealtyTrac.

The last site I checked was Realtor.com, the Web site affiliated with the National Association of Realtors, and supposedly the site with the largest number of homes for sale. If you're buying a home, Realtor.com should be one of the sites you visit.