It depends on what you're looking for. I saw a house for sale on the next street from the ex and could easily look it up because I knew the name of the area and the approximate price. But, if I want to look for farms I might be able to afford then I want to sweep a wide area, the site doesn't support that well. I don't think it's an effective sales aide though it is handy if you already know the property you're interested in. The old one was better at presenting properties suitable to a person browsing with a general idea of what they wanted.

It appears to me though, that that is all it has. Absolutely no flexibility if you don't already know the precise area to look in.

That's true.
When you have decided to look in more detail at a property, the back click to get back to where you were also takes longer while the map reloads. Previously a back click was instant.

I have a link in my favourites to mls.ca but when I clicked it - it took me to that awful realtor.ca site.

On the mls site you used to be able to insert an area of a city. For instance in Regina, you could insert "Walsh Acres" and then it only found the houses in the Walsh Acres subdivision.

On the new site, it looks like its set up for the whole of north America. I even did an advanced search, where you could put in a province and a city, but then it wanted a street. I don't know what street - I wanted a whole area.

I agree with whoever said its a dog's breakfast. There is too much information covering too large an area.

But it looks like we are stuck with it - otherwise my mls.ca link would not have taken me to realtor.ca.

Contact a local Realtor, we can set-up any search criteria you would like, by Area, price, number of beds and 100's of other criteria, in all sorts of ways, you will get an e-mail as soon as property comes available and with more information than on Realtor.ca. There should be no charge for this.

I hate the new site. It takes ages to look at listings because of the "click the picture of interest" then go back to re-load the whole map etc. Before I could scroll through many listings pretty quickly, in many different areas. The new site is annoying and makes me irritable - after about 4 houses, I've had enough.

My realtor does have me set up with a few different accounts/settings depending on criteria. The problem is that as an investor I continuously look at different areas, price ranges that change frequently. I can't ask him to set me up for every permutation (though knowing him, he probably would if I asked). It's not that I necessarily NEED the site (the last two places I bought I hadn't noticed, my realtor found them and suggested I look at them) but I like to be able to browse through listings in a timely fashion. It just annoys me that in improving the site, it has become less useful.

Well so much for that piece of information.

It appears mls.ca has gone, replaced by realtor.ca very disappointing.

This devalues the site as a marketing aid. If the user's question is "I wonder if I could afford to buy a house" or "I wonder if I could afford to trade up to xyz" then what's wanted is an easy facility to look at properties and see if the idea's a runner. At that point it's not worth signing up for umpteen arm twisting phone calls and a bombardment of junk mail.

What I want to know is "are there properties within 75 miles of Yonge/Lakeshore with more land and a better barn than we have here which I might afford", an estate agent isn't going to help because he or she knows no more than me about properties across town. If the site is easy to use then I might find a property and an agent might gain from selling it. If the site is a bother then I'll give up before finding one and no one gains.

As I see it the site isn't very well thought out. It offers a lot of features but it runs so slowly that the features are a burden. If it could be moved to a powerful computer then it would be usable as it is, otherwise it wants reworking to suit whatever limited machine capacity the real estate boards can afford.

Alot of the quotes that are appearing on the forum , seem to mirror exactly what i was thinking !

Change is definitely good.............only if it is for the better, and I do not think the new site is anywhere near as user friendly as the old site !

There is a contact section on the new site.....................maybe worth dropping a line and airing some of the problems.............if they dont get feedback , they wont change anything !

i prefer this one...
C3346954

Agreed, the new site is no where near as user friendly. Perhaps this is done so that is better for the realtor and not the buyer! Maybe a lot more will use realtors instead of the site.

My son is livid about the new site. He actually wrote to the "contact us" email and got some generic response. His main complaint is EXACTLY what my main complaint is and I think it would be relevant to this site:

Someone wants to move to Regina or Vancouver (or any city for that matter) from England. They want to look at houses. What is the first thing they ask? What are the nice neighbourhoods if you want a character house or if you want a large new house.

Before the "improvements" I could tell them - if you want a character house - look in Cathedral, Crescents and Lakeview. If you want a large new house in the north end of Regina - look in Lakewood and Lakeridge.

Now - there are NO neighbourhoods. In most cities you will find that there are desirable neighbourhoods that are quite near to non-desirable ones.

Everyone who comes on this site knows that if you move to Regina, you do not want to live in Washington Park. However, Washington Park is just block from Cathedral, which is a desirable place to live. But how anybody would be able to determine where each one is from the new site, I really don't know.

I did find this realtor's site

http://www.agents4regina.com/neighbourhood.html

I know it won't help for other cities, but at least in Regina you can search by neighbourhoods, which I think is what everyone wants to do.

If they don't change the realtor site, perhaps we could have a sticky with links to intelligible sites like the Penny Milton one that I have a link for - and we could collect them for different cities.

I definately found it harder to use and slower than the old site, not impressed

See what a wonderful bargain this makes mine look

It has taken me ages to try and navigate the new site, very disappointed and no its not because its changed.

Its because its useless if you are looking from the UK and don't know the exact area you want ? why fix it if it isn't broken ?


All those who liked the old MLS sign up here