Foundaproperty.great (FindaProperty.com)

Member Name: Boriski

Product:	FindaProperty.com
Date:	07/09/01 (654 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Free, can guage areas prices, range of rents

Disadvantages: Limited to the south of England

When myself and my 4 flatmates-to-be started looking for a house to live in next year we weren't too concerned with haste (I should point out at this point we are all students at university in London) It was ages till term started and there was no rush. All we did little other than look on our university's own list each week and with a resounding "Naaaa! don't fancy it" proceeded to do absolutely nothing.

Then it got to the summer and we left London and went back to our respective homes in Birmingham, Lincolnshire, Sheffield and Inverness.

Now obviously this was going to be a bit of a problem when we needed a house in London. Previously unknown to us however our university put its housing list on the internet. Wow! said we now we could sit at home and view the properties online before either giving a resounding Naaa don't fancy it or as I eventually did ringing up the accomodation office to discover they have 30,000 students looking at the same lists we were every day.

Clearly this was quite a few people for not many houses, especially as we were looking for 5 person flats/houses in central London. After a few disappointments i.e. we found a house the majority were willing to accept and neglected to tell the remainder about, rang up and found out it had already gone we needed a new plan.

This would be a plan so cunning, so devious that it would be worthy of the great Baldrick himself. Yes our plan was to actually look somewhere else other than the lists provided by our own universities.

One of my flatmates being blessed with a rather more-organised girlfriend pointed out that she had found a house off findaproperty.com and that maybe we should try that.

"Why didn't you mention that before?" we demanded
"well we were looking for a five" said he
"yes....?" we replied
"well they were looking for a flat for two!"

afte
r deep contemplation that our country might be rather safer without this man graduating with a medical degree we returned to our computers to continue the hunt.

Site Layout

The site is on first impressions a little complex but with a few goes we quickly got the hang of actually searching the areas we wanted to.

It isn't the prettiest site in the world but it is perfectly functional and given the amount of variable in choosing a house it is probably almost as straightforward as it could be

Areas covered

We found the site indispensable because we wanted a house in London. On examination the site does not really extend much beyond the south of England so it's appeal wil be limited to people wanting to buy houses there.

Value for Money

It's free! We didn;t have to pay anything. The site mearly acts as a conduit between buyer and estate agent or seller or whatever... You are under no obligation to make any purchases whatsoever. On top of that we found the site pretty useful just for checking out the rough price in various areas to decide where to concentrate our efforts. Most of all the site is not as many restricted to the more pricey end of the market as we 5 hard-up students prooved by getting a deluge of possible houses on the searches.

So the million dollar question how does it actually fair?

Well we looked at three houses in one day using the site. We used links to e-mail the agents and they called us back so they must have received them. Beyond the bringing together of buyer and seller the site has no further responsibility so it served its purpose perfectly.

The five of us are now moving into a house in Battersea next month ready for the start of term and the panic and hunt are over.

I highly recommend Findaproperty.com from a buyer's point of view we got a house within 5 days of first using it. This was especially important given that we
didn't live in London so had to rent accomodation; we needed a quick result and could not afford to just go down and look, we needed solid appointments on arrival. Especially given we were looking in central London with a limited budget I think I can safely say that shows its this site's worth

Summary: