Househunting

There are some brilliant resources online for househunting:

A Rightmove account or similar allows you to set up regular updates to help find a property. Some estate agents update on Rightmove before their own site at times, but it's best to check both. To find out which estate agents are active in a given area, and collate their web addresses for your 'favourites', Estate Angels is a good place to start, unless you've got a local paper - not everything is quicker online!

Once you've found a house you like, its council tax band can be checked - the site is also useful for finding out the post code, which is key to getting house price information.

Find out what the house or others in the street sold for recently with Your Move, or examine local house price trends using the first half of the post code - use the property finder in The Times Online and then look up the market summary report for a property in the list that results. BBC news also has useful more general regional information.

To see what a neighbourhood looks like, or to find the way to the shops, Flashearth has the aerial photos from several sites - pick the one with the best definition, and superimpose the streets if you get 'lost'! A new function that has appeared on some map sites is a 'bird's eye view' where you can get closer still, at an angle, as if you are swooping down over the buildings. You can then look around you by rotating the image. It doesn't seem like Loughborough has been done yet, but here's an example from elsewhere.

The only problem with all this information being online, is that you probably consider more places in more detail - leaving less time to go and view the actual places...