Why consider subscribing to this free email broadcast?
If you are interested in buying a Hawaiian home, condo, land or Big Island business, and want to do some research on your own, the UPdate is an invaluable tool. I generate the UPdate every night from my home at no cost to subscribers, and it is emailed to you on a daily basis. The UPdate covers the last 24 hours of real estate activity including new listings, price changes, and sales of property (homes, condos and land) listed with the Hawaii Multiple Listing Service (MLS). But there are many advantages over what you, as an individual, can access directly at the MLS website. The UPdate has other tidbits that are shared when appropriate, such as when a commercial listing comes available that is unusual, what the best deals are that day and so forth.
First of all, you won’t easily find the current listings all presented on one find just using the MLS. You’d have to go through several processes for each type of property and each area of concern. Unless you have a good high speed connection, you won’t find these search and retrievals are very fast, either, whereas with the UPdate the info is presented to you in seconds, and you can read it faster as well.
Second you won’t find the actual property addresses listed at the Hawaii Multiple Listing Service, but you will on the UPdate list. If you are in the area, you won’t be able to drive by without an address now will you? If you are familiar with the geography of the Big Island, some of the descriptions on the Hawaii Multiple Listing Service may be helpful, but oftentimes the only way to place where the property is located is with an address. Those with little familiarity with the geography of the Big Island can still use a map , and the address information provided by the UPdate.
Third, the UPdate list will give you the TaxKey which, by examining the numbers, will tell you the area where the property is located. This may sound useless at first until you consider that the price of the property you choose to purchase can vary drastically based upon what area it is in, and secondarily, that many people prefer different temperature extremes, and these also vary according area and elevation. Using the UPdate is the only way you can independently get this information at no cost or obligation.
If you don’t know or don’t remember what the numbers mean in relation to the areas, you can always come back to this website and click “Sample UPdate”. You can refer back to it as often as you need to, but eventually you’ll read the TaxKey very fast and be able to scan the UPdate for what you are interested in in mere seconds as opposed to the great amount of time it would take to do the same via the MLS.
Fourth, you can save the UPdates and with a word processor or the built in FIND of your web browser, search and retrieve for hundreds of criteria over days or months of data you have saved. Do you find a property has been reduced and wonder what it was listed for in the beginning? — You can do your own search if you have kept the UPdates. Do you want to find other properties with a similar address? — That is possible using the UPdates but not possible with the general public access to the MLS.
Another invaluable way to use the UPdates is to do some browsing yourself at the Hawaii Multiple Listing Service, then take the MLS number and FIND it in the UPdate. You will find the original listing price, any reductions, any re-listings, and most important you will have the TaxKey number so you know the area, and you will have the address so you can further determine whether the property is where you are interested in buying.
So where does all this lead? You can learn more about the properties available and gain a sense of what the market movement is by spending a few minutes with the UPdate each time it comes. You can figure out how much property is going for in the area you want to live in based upon criteria such as property size and number of bedrooms by spending just a moment or so when the UPdate comes in your email. As you learn and come to know what the range is for the property you want, you can figure out if that will be affordable for your budget or not — if not you may need to consider a different area perhaps? But you can work this out with this free tool from the comfort of your own home. And if you read the UPdate on a regular basis, you will be able to notice when property is coming on the market faster or slower. That can be important if you will need to fly in from the Mainland. It makes more sense to fly in when there are several potential properties that match what you may be interested in rather than just pick a date and fly in and hope that there may be a property available. You increase your odds of finding suitable property by studying and applying the UPdate tool with the MLS listings as opposed to just flying in and guessing.
You can solely depend on a real estate agent to know your needs and call you when a property comes on the market. But you may gain valuable insight and be able to adjust your needs when you examine the data made available with the UPdate. And further, unless you have experience with a real estate agent, do you know whether a property that might fit you would be missed or maybe there is someone currently being shown property that would be directed to a listing before you would? Real estate agents are only human, and they can only do so much in a day, but if you can help yourself and help your agent by being proactive in the process I think you are a step ahead.