If you’re looking to buy a home in Newcastle, there’s a good chance that you’re aware of Domain and Real Estate already. If you want to find some alternatives, there are plenty of resources online that can help you.

Making the most of Domain and Real Estate

As the two leaders in property listings in Newcastle and the rest of Australia, you’d be making life hard for yourself if you ignored them both. While most listings show up on both sites, some agents do have a preference for one or the other so it’s worth looking at both. To make sure you find the best real estate listings in Newy, here are a few tips:

• Save your searches: If you’ve got a dream home in mind, save that search. Use the filters to make it as wide or narrow as you like, but put in suburbs, bedrooms, price limits and anything else that’s important to you. This way, every time you go back to the site or app, you can quickly search for your favourites.
• Set up alerts: Once you have your searches saved, you can also create alerts. This way you’ll be pinged whenever a new property matches your requirements. If you like it, you can get in touch with the selling agent immediately.
• Find out the real price: Sick of seeing listings that are ‘new to market’ or have ‘contact agent’ instead of a price range? If you’re computer savvy, you can quickly find the price of any property listed online or you can install a browser extension like Homer.
• Search broadly: If you haven’t decided where you want to buy yet, you can search for the real estate all over Newcastle. On Domain, put ‘Newcastle & region‘ in the search box. On RealEstate, type ‘Newcastle – Great Region‘.

Read more: Discover the cheapest suburbs in Newcastle

Other listing sites

Almost every property ends up on Domain and Real Estate, but there are other options out there:

• Buy My Place: Cut out the agents altogether by buying direct from the owner. With professionals like mortgage brokers and conveyancers on your side, you can feel confident that everything’s above board.
• Gumtree: It may have been edged out by Marketplace for many things, but Gumtree still gets a few properties posted, especially by owners selling themselves.
• Property: Great to use alongside your standard research. Property.com.au includes extra information like photos from previous listings and details about local schools. Homely is a similar sort of site.
• Property Whispers: Some properties don’t have the same marketing budget behind them and they prefer to sell off-market. To find properties like this, a site like Property Whispers is a must-have to bookmark.

Real estate sites/mailing lists

Many real estate agents like to share their properties with qualified leads before they properly hit the market. It’s a win-win.

For agents, it gives them a chance to match a property with a buyer without shelling out for advertising campaigns. For buyers, they get alerted of properties before people scrolling property listings on their apps.

Speak to as many agents as you can, visit as many sites as possible and sign up to all the newsletters (more on this in ‘other tips’ later on), and you’ll find that properties come to you.

Don’t sleep on buyers agencies either, as they often list off-market properties on their sites too. For a small fee, can get you access to these properties a lot more easily than you might find them otherwise.

Other tips

When you’re looking for a new home, you’re going to be asked for your email address and phone number by every agent you talk to. This is very useful while you’re looking for a home, but after you’ve bought it would be great if you could stop all communications.

The easiest way to do this is to set up a new email address before you start house hunting and use that for all property sites, real estate agents and similar. If you can afford a prepaid sim for a month or two, that’s another good way to go off grid afterwards.

As well as this, make sure you have the best experts on your side. Speak to friends and read reviews to make sure you’re working with the best conveyancers, pest/building inspectors and mortgage brokers in Newcastle.