How to Analyze Realtor.com Homes for Sale with Mashvisor

If you’re interested in analyzing Realtor.com homes for sale as part of your next investment strategy, here’s how to do it successfully.

 Table of Contents 

1. What Is Realtor.com?
2. Analyzing Realtor.com Homes for Sale With Mashvisor
3. The Importance of Real Estate Market Analysis
4. Final Thoughts

Analyzing a house for sale—and considering all its features—is arguably the single most time-consuming part of a real estate investor’s job.

A complete property analysis involves many factors, from spending time “on the field” and researching neighborhoods to estimating property value and assessing profitability. In short, gathering data and crunching the numbers take a lot of work.

That’s why, today, we’ll talk more about analyzing Realtor.com homes for sale—and how Mashvisor’s platform can help in such regard.

So, if you already found a lucrative property on the real estate listing website, stick around until the end of this guide—we have a lot to discuss.

What Is Realtor.com?

First off, for those unfamiliar with Realtor.com, we’d like to explain what it is and what it does.

Realtor.com is an online real estate platform where investors and home buyers can browse different types of investment properties and keep up with the current situation and trends in the market.

Realtor.com’s first appearance was marked under a slightly different name, though. Back then, the website was known as The Realtor Information Network (RIN), which was essentially a closed network that provided access to information exclusively to the members of the National Association of Realtors (NAR).

In 1996, however, it became open to the public, and soon enough, it became a listing source for many well-known companies, such as NBC, USA Today, America Online, etc.

Realtor.com hit its peak of popularity in 2018 with the slogan “The Home of Home Search,” when it became noticed for its creativity, usefulness, and effective digital marketing.

Currently, Realtor.com real estate listings & homes for sale website is the second most visited website, with an outstanding 100 million active users.

While we’re on the topic, let’s cover some FAQs.

Is Realtor.com a public company now?

 Yes. Realtor.com is owned by a public company that operates the website.

Who owns Realtor.com?

A parent company, News Corporation, owns Realtor.com. The website is also licensed by the NAR, meaning that most of the information you come across here originates from MLS listings, which contributes to their accuracy.

Realtor.com Features

To do your research on homes for sale on Realtor.com successfully, you need to be familiar with its main features. And that’s what we’re going to cover here.

Some of the main features include:

• Listing Syndication: Submitting properties for sale on the listing service in order to increase their visibility to interested homebuyers.

• Listing Management Portal: It’s a portal that helps manage and sort through listing details more easily. It includes photos of the property in question, its values, fixtures, amenities, etc.

• CMA Tools: The CMA Tools feature allows you to sort through real estate listings and use them as comparables for further comparative market analysis.

• MLS Integration: As we’ve mentioned, the data is pulled from updated MLS listings, ensuring accuracy.

They are just some of the features that can assist you in your search for Realtor.com real estate homes for sale and rent.

Related: What Is the Best Rental Property Returns Calculator in 2022?

How to Search for Homes on Realtor.com?

Starting the search for your ideal home on Realtor.com is actually pretty straightforward. You just select “Buy” on the main page. And from there, you need to enter the address, ZIP code, or a specific neighborhood, and the algorithm will show the listings in that area.

For a more precise search, though, you can scroll down for a categorization based on:

• Homes Around $260,000
• Newest Listings
• Upcoming Open Homes
• Affordable Homes
• Luxury Homes

Here’s another thing to note about Realtor.com, especially if you are a real estate investor who is always on the go—it’s also available as a mobile app you can download. In addition, you can rely on speedy home alerts to keep you from missing out on a new listing.

Analyzing Realtor.com Homes for Sale With Mashvisor

As the slogan indicates, Realtor.com essentially allows real estate investors to do thorough research on homes for sale.

The website allows you to browse through countless lucrative properties for sale—all the while considering their most compelling features, staying within budget, and, most importantly, remaining objective throughout your investment journey.

While researching houses for sale on the site, you can rest assured that Realtor.com relies on the latest property metrics and provides a realistic overview of the market situation at any given moment. It is definitely worth emphasizing, given the size and scope of the US housing market.

Real estate investors and prospective buyers are provided with updated statistics for the country’s 300 hottest metropolitan areas and more than 1,000 counties.

And if you’re planning on buying Realtor.com homes for sale by owner, know that there are currently more than 516,362 active listings on Realtor.com.

However, the real research doesn’t officially start until you include Mashvisor’s tools and key features that can help you get the job done more quickly and efficiently.

Obviously, it’s crucial to cover all the necessary aspects and perform an adequate, thorough analysis of your potential property. And here’s how Mashvisor can help you do it.

Choosing the Market

Before getting into the core of condos for sale, for example, you should first ensure that you’ve chosen the right real estate market by looking into its economic metrics.

The indicators we’re referring to are population, job opportunities, and economic growth—all crucial factors that must be met for your investment to make high returns.

You want to get the part right. Mashvisor’s blog is packed with all the necessary information you need to check before you decide on the real estate market.

Close-Up Neighborhood Analysis

Next, you need to conduct a proper neighborhood analysis to get a 100% realistic picture of your potential property.

It is important to stress that neighborhoods within the same real estate market can drastically differ in their profitability and potential. It’s something that often gets overlooked, though.

Mashvisor’s Heatmap Tool offers investors a chance to perform an in-depth analysis and see if their chosen location is worth investing in or not. Even more so, they are able to filter through options—and adjust them to their preferences.

The search options include:

• Listing price
• Traditional cash on cash return
• Airbnb cash on cash return
• Traditional rental income
• Airbnb rental income
• Airbnb occupancy rate

What makes Mashvisor’s Heatmap stand out is the fact that it allows real estate investors to analyze two or more neighborhoods at a time and compare their conditions.

Most importantly, it’s easy to use and color-coded:

The green areas on the map represent profitable locations, so you know where to look—and what areas to avoid.

Related: How to Evaluate a Neighborhood Before Investing

In-Depth Property Analysis

Let’s say you’ve zoomed in on the profitable real estate market. Now, you need to conduct an in-depth property analysis.

In order to do so, combine the knowledge from homes for sale Realtor.com with Mashvisor’s Property Finder, and you’ll get the full effect.

The tool essentially allows you to perform a comprehensive analysis of a particular property by choosing the filters that match your criteria:

• Budget
• Location (up to 5 cities)
• Property type
• Number of bedrooms and bathrooms

The above is only part of the story. Next comes the investment analysis, which can be performed with our Investment Property Calculator. It saves you a ton of time—and provides precise numbers that can guide your investment strategy.

Equipped with updated neighborhood information, the tool provides the following data:

• Median Property Price
• Average Price per Square Foot
• Average Traditional and Airbnb Rental Income
• Average Traditional and Airbnb Cash on Cash Return
• Average Airbnb Occupancy Rate
• Optimal Rental Strategy
• Optimal Bedroom Number
• Optimal Property Type
• Number of Traditional and Airbnb Properties for Sale
• Walk Score
• Mashmeter Score
• Real Estate Comps

As you can see, you are presented with a handful of information that will guide you through your investment strategy. So, it would be wise to make use of all of them.

Do you only want to know the potential Airbnb rental income of a specific property? Use our free Airbnb calculator instead.

Comparative Market Analysis

Another thing homebuyers should be familiar with is the importance of a proper Comparative Market Analysis. Essentially, it involves looking at comparables or comps—properties that have similar characteristics.

You can find comps by searching for homes on Realtor.com homes for rent to sale. The process itself is pretty straightforward. You just type in an address, and the algorithm will handle everything else—scan comps and do the estimates.

Most real estate investors will typically rely on MLS data to locate comps. However, that’s only possible if you’re a licensed real estate agent with access to the listings.

But what if you’re not?

Mashvisor steps in by allowing you to access the listings anyway. It means you can get extensive data regarding sale price and date, square footage, and other necessary information about any comparable you’re interested in at the moment.

Related: How to Make Your Own Comparative Market Analysis Template

The Importance of Real Estate Market Analysis

The importance of market analysis in real estate investing is undeniable.

Regardless of whether you’re approaching it as a seller or a buyer, it’s vital that you gain the necessary information and understand the current situation and trends.

Several factors further highlight the importance of doing a real estate analysis, including the following three:

• Current economic state
• Demographics
• Interest rates

Current Economic State

Here, we’re referring to the “health” of the economy within the real estate market that you are currently researching. It means paying attention to the following economic data:

• GDP
• Employment data
• Manufacturing activity
• The prices of goods

Logically, if the economy’s been stagnant for too long, you can generally expect that your investment will follow the same patterns.

The current state of the economy exerts different effects on the real estate investing business. For example, rising housing prices can make it more difficult for novice investors to climb the property ladder and deal with their finances.

Demographics

Demographics is an often overlooked (and underappreciated) factor that significantly influences the real estate market as a whole—and, in turn, your own ability to develop profitable investment strategies.

Demographics refer to the composition of the population that inhabits a particular area, such as their age, gender, race, population growth, and so on. It plays an important role in targeting future tenants.

If you’re looking for a more “luxurious” and younger clientele, you should focus on more developed places and search for a duplex for sale, for example.

On a similar note, researching the demographics of coastal areas gives you the opportunity to pin down the most profitable location for vacation homes.

The key thing here is to align your investment strategy with the population that predominantly resides in your preferred neighborhood—and build your strategy around that.

Interest Rates

Lastly, there are the interest rates, which are unavoidable during any investment venture.

Why should checking interest rates always be on your to-do list?

As interest rates change, the situation in the real estate market changes, as well.

Lower interest rates mean that the buyer will be able to obtain the mortgage more easily and purchase a property. It automatically increases the demand in the market—which, in turn, leads to a jump in prices.

On the other hand, high-interest rates make paying off the mortgage difficult.

By relying on Mashvisor’s Mortgage Calculator, you can stay on top of the numbers—and avoid the common pitfalls of financing your investment.

Final Thoughts

We’ve managed to close the topic of analyzing Realtor.com homes for sale with the help of Mashvisor. Now, let’s just briefly summarize the main points we’ve mentioned.

Realtor.com is an online real estate platform where real estate investors can browse different types of investment properties. It’s been around since 1996, and now, it is the second-largest and most visited online listing source.

Realtor.com’s most valuable features include the Listing Syndication, Listing Management Portal, CMA Tools, and MLS integration. And investors don’t need to worry about the accuracy of the information, either.

To make the most of your investment, you’ll need to team up with Mashvisor’s tools that will allow you to stay within budget. It will also help you to be objective when it comes to choosing the most profitable property.

Finding the most lucrative property involves researching different real estate markets, performing a detailed neighborhood analysis, and using the Investment Property Calculator. Mashvisor makes it easier for investors to make the right choices.

To start your free trial of Mashvisor, click here.