How to Search for Homes in Brainerd Minnesota

By admin • August 3rd, 2009

If you are like me you are probably a bit overwhelmed by the volume of real estate websites all offering to fulfill you real estate needs. At lakehome.com we try to offer fresh, easy to use  real estate listings. We are constantly updating our housing databases.

Not everyone is familiar with filling out filter options for online searches. This post is intended to help you learn how to fully utilize our Brainerd, MN listings page here. We will explain each feature and also take you through a mock search. Once we are done you will be able to search for a house in many different ways and learn how to see the newest properties around the Brainerd Lakes Area without doing anything.
brainerd-minnesota-real-estate

A. MLS/Property Type

Enter the MLS Number. If you have a MLS number for a property enter it and press enter, you’re done, it’s that simple. You can also select the property type: Residential, condo, farm, land and commercial are all terms you can search for.

B. City Selection

You can really break it down by the area here. We cover much of central Minnesota, literally A-Z, Aitkin to Zimmerman and pretty much everywhere else. For our examples we will mostly be talking about the Brainerd, MN and Baxter, MN area.

The first box displays “Major Area(s)” and can handle multiple selections. Select several at once by holding down the  “Crtl” button on your keyboard and clicking on the selection with your mouse pointer, select as many as you’d like. The “Major Area” displays different zones of cities, for example, S.E. Brainerd, S.W. Brainerd, N.E. Brainerd, and N.W. Brainerd. It’s a great feature that can speed up the process if your looking by location or neighborhoods.

The next box in this section is a “Area City(s)” search. This one is pretty self-explanatory, set a city you’d like to search for a home in. You can also have multiple selections on this field as well.

C. Search by Body of Water.

“Select Area Lake(s)” and “Select Area River(s)” – Easy enough. If you are looking for a house on a certain lake or river than you can set those filter options here.

D. Search by Lot Size, Price, and Bed/Bathrooms.

Enter any of these options here.

E. Quicklinks

There are a couple of links worth mentioning up in the “E” section. The first, “Notifications” it is a great free service.  Recently, I had someone who was looking at properties for several months. Anyone who has been looking for houses for that long is at the point where they want to be the first to see a property, no more messing around. Everybody wants to see new listings! This is a way to make sure you don’t let the one get away.

If you click on “notifications” it takes you to a page like our search page, without the graphics. Here you put in your price range, the location, and how big of house you are looking for. Once you submit the form we will notify you the minute anything that matches your requirements comes on the market. It will be emailed to you automatically. You will see properties newer than new! I really like this feature and always use and recommend it.

The “Daily Hotlist“  will show you a page that displays all of the new properties for the day. We set this up so you can just subscribe to this as an rss feed here. Now you can view all the new listings from the hotlist on your Rss reader it’s totally effortless!

Quickprint is nice if you need to print out a couple of listings quickly. I always use it before going out to look at properties. Simply enter the mls numbers and a printer-friendly page will be ready to go.

“Favorite Properties List” allows you to save properties for future reference. To add a property to your personal list, simply click on the link that says “Add To My Favorites List” from the property listings or the full property information page on our website.

F. Real Estate quicklinks

With just one click you can see all the Brainerd Minnesota Lake Homes from $50,000-100,000, up to 2 mill, Lake Shamineau Lake Homes – $500,000-700,000, White Fish Lake Homes, A quick link to all residential listings in the  Brainerd - Baxter Minnesota, Nisswa Minnesota, and all of Positive Realty commercial listings.

Brainerd/Baxter Minnesota Search Example

If you have been driving around the Brainerd Minnesota area you have seen for sale signs in front of some houses. You can jot down the MLS number of the houses you are interested in. A couple real estate agents don’t always put the MLS on new properties and some just don’t include it. The MLS number is displayed on the sign though.

A. Enter the MLS number to complete your search

At times you don’t have time to stop and look at the MLS number, heard of a house but haven’t had a chance to drive past, or just looking to see what’s out there. Don’t have the MLS number? No problem! Just enter a few filter options to limit the search to display only the listings you desire. Maybe you were driving through Baxter and saw the house on Eagle Ridge Drive but don’t remember the MLS. The more you can enter into the search fields, the better your results will be. Let’s look at the property:

example

12752 Eagle Ridge Dr. Baxter, MN.

$324,900, 3 bed, 2 bath, on the Mississippi River.

So we can tell a few things about this house for our search. It’s on a body of water, what side of town it is on, and you can probably estimate a price range to search by.

Here are a few ways we could find the house:

1)

B.  Enter the area – Baxter S.E.

D. Enter the price range – $200,000-$600,000

There it is! #3 on the results page. The results display by lowest to highest price, so that means there is two cheaper houses in that area.

2) The house is on the Mississippi in Baxter, MN. You can enter the body of water as a search term.

B. Enter city in area city search – Baxter

C. Enter the river – Mississippi River.

D. Enter price – $200,000 – 600,000 (once again, this is your estimation)

You can see it is the #3 result again. Notice that the other two properties displayed are different from the search before. They are two properties located in Baxter that match our price range and located on the river. There are many different ways to search through the listings, as long as you get your desired results, do whatever works best for you. If you are having any trouble at all please contact us.

Comments(2) Advice, Brainerd Lakes Area

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