After visiting the mortgage broker and getting an idea of how much we can afford (oh I just found this link with some very sensible advice on how much you can afford), I wanted to go looking for a realtor to help me wade through the house-buying process. When I mentioned I didn’t yet have one, the mortgage broker offered to refer me to an agency. Sure enough, a few days later I got a call from a realtor who asked about my basic needs and signed me up for Centris, the Quebec equivalent of MLS.

The realtor enters your search criteria, such as price range, number of bedrooms/bathrooms, type of construction, desired neighborhoods and some other features. Then the system will e-mail you when new listings are published. Supposedly you’ll have access to “pre-listings”, but in practice I’ve been able to see the same listings that are published in http://centris.ca.

However, the Realtor-managed site does show a lot of additional information, like more detail on the rooms, better data on building/lot areas, and very importantly, information about closing dates, which may even influence the interest rate you’ll get for the loan.

Additionally, I sent my realtor a list we wrote with the requirements we had for a property. We indicated general building requirements, possible locations, and other wishlist items such as “no creepy basements”, closeness to parks, river and amenities, distance to public transport and so on. She thought this was quite useful to fine-tune the criteria, although since the process is mechanized, there are some criteria the system is not able to verify (e.g. no concept of creepiness on basements).

Keep in mind that the data captured in Centris may be inaccurate, and that could affect the results of filtering. Example: initially we specified we wanted to have a driveway (though not necessarily a garage) and there were very few listings. After we removed the driveway criteria, a lot more popped up, and a lot of them did have driveways! The issue here is that the listing brokers didn’t capture that information. So try to make your criteria as broad as possible, and do part of the filtering yourself, when going through the listings.

Another example: we wanted two bathrooms (even if one of them is a half-bathroom with no shower), but if you ask the system for 2 bathrooms, sometimes it doesn’t consider halfs in the criteria. So even though it’s super important for us, we decided to leave this criteria out and are focusing on visually checking for a second bathroom and/or possibility of building one.

Once listings start landing in my inbox, we compiled a list of houses we wanted to visit and told the realtor about them.