Go house hunting, virtually

Real-estate websites are indispensable tools, whether you’re a serious homebuyer, thinking of selling or just curious about what your neighbors pay in taxes. You can get a sense of how much your home is worth and arrange for regular updates when properties in communities of your choosing are listed or have a price change.

Consumer Reports researched four real-estate websites.

Realtor.com

Unique features: Sponsored by the National Association of Realtors. Users have access to almost 800 Multiple Listing Services (MLS) nationwide. The website’s “Request Renovation Report” feature provides home-renovation information gleaned from public records.

What Consumer Reports liked: You can easily check property records for every house on a street. Property pages prominently list upcoming open houses. Local market data is clear and useful. Realtor.com’s mobile app lets you use your fingertip to outline the area you want to focus on and search for homes by school district.

Redfin.com

Unique features: Home shoppers who want to view a home in person are connected with a salaried Redfin buyer’s agent. If you buy with the agent, Redfin pays you a rebate based on the home price and your responses to a satisfaction survey. If you use Redfin, your total cost is a 4 to 4.5 percent commission, a discount from the 5 or 6 percent traditional in many places. “Last Call” option informs you when competing buyers weigh in with bids so that you can counter. In markets it serves, it offers free home-buying classes.

What Consumer Reports liked: Home search tool is fairly robust; among other features, you can specify fixer-uppers, waterfront homes and homes with views. If a house you covet is not for sale, type its address and “favorite” it; Redfin will send an alert if it gets listed. With “Price Whisperer,” a potential seller can upload his or her home’s photos and set a potential selling price with a Redfin agent; the agent then polls up to 250 buyers in the area, asking whether they would buy at that price, and reports the results.

Trulia.com

Unique features: Focuses on an area’s lifestyle factors, including proximity of particular stores, restaurants and cafes, as well as crime statistics. You can set a commute time by auto or public transportation to a specific location; the search tool identifies properties with commute times that fit those parameters. When you’re on the move, you can use the Apple and Android apps to identify nearby open houses that are in progress or about to start.

What Consumer Reports liked: A “walk score” assesses how easy it is to do errands on foot from the home. The site offers deep demographic data, such as where single people in the area live or the prevalence of college-educated residents around a given property. You can limit your search to a particular school district.

Zillow.com

Unique features: Provides deep analytics and data on individual properties and municipalities, including historical trends. Zillow’s Home Value Forecast, for instance, crunches local properties’ Zestimates to project whether local prices will rise, fall or flatten. Provides a nationwide real-estate agent directory that shows how many recent deals each agent has done, as well as customer reviews.

What Consumer Reports liked: A “Price This Home” feature lets potential sellers claim their property on Zillow and select their own “comps” – nearby properties that have recently sold – to create their own private price estimate that’s not published on the site. That way, they can take into account local features that the Zestimate algorithm might not have taken into consideration. “Walk score,” similar to Trulia’s, assesses how easy it is to do errands on foot from the home.

To learn more, visit ConsumerReports.org.

2016 Consumers Union Inc.