Zillow Advice: Home Buying - Is there a way to search for houses with 3 car garages? Also the direction that they face?

Zillow presently does not ...

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 11:27:00 GMT

Zillow presently does not offer either filter. You can use a Google Advanced search
google.com/advanced_search?hl=en
limiting the domain name to:
http://www.zillow.com/homedetails

If a house for sale has a 3 car garage, it would be in the discription and show up with such a search IF the Google crawler was able to crawl those pages. But Zillow doesn't have any fixed index pages for the properties, rather relying on dynamically created search results pages, thus the crawler misses the majority of the 80 million homes. (Zillow can easily fix this, but it has not been a priority yet).

Zillow has indicated they are working on adding some additional filters, but we have no idea when they will be released, or what they will include. The two most likely are "pools" and "horse properties".

As for direction a house faces, the easiest is to use the "list" results format, which returns about 20 housing units per page, filtered for "single family" (avoid the condos); copy the results of each of the pages to Excel; reformat in columns, then sort by street name and even/odd street number. For most cities, streets either go north & south, or east and west, and the even or odd number determines the side of the street, and the majority of houses construct in the United States face the street. This doesn't help on "drives" or "circles" or "courts", or some "boulevards", but it does address the majority of the properties, and then you can use the bird's eye views to verify.

A few short macros will allow copying data to the desired Excel format fairly quickly, though Zillow really doesn't approve of such macros.

Not sure if you can here ...

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 05:30:00 GMT

Not sure if you can here either. You can search by selecting multiple criteria including minimum number of car spaces here.
Ideally you should be able to search by which direction the front of the house faces but even if that selection is available on a search the reality is that, that field when entering the information into the MLS system is often not filled in. It is not a mandatory field. Meaning if we run a search (which we can do, just not on our main site) by the criteria "the front faces - xxxx" ... we would miss many houses since that field is typically not filled in.

I don't think you can here. ...

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 16:46:00 GMT

I don't think you can here. If you go to http://searchhomedenver.com you will be able to define an area on the map, then filter properties that meet your price point, have the 3 car garage, etc. The direction a home faces is not searchable.

I can do a MLS search and take into account the direction it faces, if you would like me to do so, feel free to contact me.

Good Luck with your search, it's a great time to buy!