Finding a new place to live can mean very different things, depending on whether you’re buying a house, renting an apartment, comparing neighborhoods or still figuring out what fits your budget. Real estate websites have evolved around those different needs, and the best place to look really depends on what you're looking for.
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That's a big part of the reason there are so many different sites for home searches: They do a lot of different things. Some span the broader real estate market, covering homes for sale, rentals and new construction. Some platforms are specifically for searching for rental homes. Some have specific types of filters, like rooms for rent or pet-friendly homes.
The seven sites below provide a wide range of different ways to approach a home or apartment search, from browsing active listings to researching what living in a particular neighborhood may actually be like. If you're looking for your next place to live, these sites are sure to cover your bases.
Homes.com is a full-service real estate search site that covers homes for sale, rentals and recently sold properties. One of the things that sets it apart is how much information it offers on each property: extensive neighborhood and school pages with local descriptions, photos, videos, housing trends, walkability and transit information, school data and nearby amenities.
The site also offers Homes AI, a conversational search tool that can answer property and neighborhood questions, surface school ratings and tax history and calculate distances to points of interest. Searchers can still browse by location, neighborhood or school and narrow the results to categories, like new properties, open houses, price drops and luxury homes. The combination of different search features makes Homes.com a top choice for anyone who wants to find the right home, but also the right community surrounding it.
The New York Times Real Estate section isn't a conventional home listing marketplace. It offers real estate journalism that can add context to your housing search, especially if you're researching neighborhoods, prices and the trade-offs other buyers and renters make in specific areas.
Its recurring features include "The Hunt," which follows individual buyers and renters along on their home searches; "Living In," which profiles neighborhoods in New York and other markets; and "What You Get," which compares what a certain budget buys in different locations.
Rather than beginning with a large page of listings and letting renters do all the filtering, Apartment List asks questions about budget, move-in dates, preferred neighborhoods and must-have amenities, then helps match you to apartments that might fit by generating a ranked list.
It also flags no-fee apartments, notifies renters about price drops and availability changes and shows pricing concessions more clearly when a property is offering a promotion. Apartment List supplements its matching system with tools, such as pet-friendly and nearby searches, renter guides and a cost-of-living calculator for people considering a move to another city.
Personalization is what makes Apartment List stand out from other platforms. It shrinks large rental markets down depending on your preferences and priorities, which can make your home search more manageable.
Apartments.com is a rental-focused marketplace with more than 1.4 million listings for apartments, houses, condos and townhomes. Its search tools cover the usual factors, like price, property type, amenities and move-in date, but the site offers quite a bit more to help you find the right home.
You can view detailed floor plans and unit-level information, take Matterport 3D tours of participating properties, estimate one-time and monthly costs, schedule tours and submit rental applications online. Apartments.com also offers area guides with information, such as local rent trends, demographics and cost of living. For homes managed through its platform, you can even sign your lease and pay rent online — a convenient end-to-end rental process.
Rent.com is dedicated to rental housing, letting you search for apartments, houses, condos and townhomes by city, neighborhood or zip code. It also allows filtering for common searches, such as pet-friendly rentals, inexpensive apartments, luxury apartments, studios and homes with different numbers of bedrooms.
Individual listings can include floor plans, property amenities, move-in offers, school information, maps and street views, along with options to contact the property or request an application. Rent.com also has a mobile app where you can save properties you're considering to come back to them later.
One thing that sets Rent.com apart is its resource library, which has articles on apartment hunting, moving, budgeting and other rental-related topics. It also offers tools like a rent calculator designed to help users estimate an appropriate housing budget.
Realtor.com is a wide-ranging real estate platform for buying, renting and selling homes. Buyers can search traditional real estate listings, as well as open houses, land and foreclosures.
It also offers tools to help with home buying, such as an affordability calculator that factors in income, debt, location and available down payment funds, or a mortgage calculator designed to estimate monthly and closing costs. The site also provides resources for researching down payment assistance programs.
This makes Realtor.com especially useful for anyone who wants to do more than just browse homes for sale — if you want to work through the financial side of a purchase, there's a lot here than can help. Renters can use the platform as well, but its range of buying tools and property categories gives it a much stronger homeownership focus.
ForRent.com specializes in rentals, including apartments, houses, condos and townhomes. Its search system offers filters for price, amenities and pet policies, along with an interactive map, neighborhood information and detailed property pages that contain floor plans and photos of each unit.
One of ForRent.com’s more helpful tools is its side-by-side listing comparison feature, which lets you easily compare properties you have saved, rather than moving back and forth between individual listings.
ForRent.com also offers location-based tools for renters with particularly specific search areas. Its "Near Me" search can look for properties around a chosen point, making it particularly useful for comparing rentals based, not only on the unit itself, but on location and day-to-day practicality.
Prices listed reflect time and date of publication and are subject to change.
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