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When you need a telephone number, where do you turn? If you’re like most people, you flip open the Yellow Pages – the telephone directory. Directories are so much a part of our everyday lives that we take their presence for granted. The building directory helps you find the right office or apartment. The employee directory will help you find the right person in the right department. A film directory helps you find the movie that you’re looking for by title, subject, actors, director or producer.

One of today’s most popular ‘search engines’ started life as a directory – and still is. Yahoo! has one of the most comprehensive directories of web sites online. But when you’re looking for specific information, especially regional information, it pays to turn to a specialty directory to help you find what you want. An online real estate directory is the best place to turn when you’re looking for a information about buying, selling, inspecting and improving property.

What is a real estate directory?
Like most web directories, a real estate directory is a listing of web sites indexed and organized to make things easier to find. Depending on the real estate directory, the listings available will be indexed according to region, agent, type of property or price – and often all of the above. Other sections will be clearly labeled as well – a comprehensive real estate directory offers more than just properties for sale. You’ll find listings for appraisers, inspectors, home improvement sites, contractors – almost anything that has to do with real estate.

Why a real estate directory?
Unlike a single realtor site, a real estate directory will cover listings from many different sources, which gives you the widest possible variety of listings to search through. A trip through a real estate directory will give you a good feel for the general market conditions in the region where you plan to buy – and make it easier for you to find a realtor who is listing the properties that you want to buy. After all, why deal with a realtor who specializes in luxury condos when you’re looking for a two-bedroom bungalow on the lake?

While traditional search engines are a good place to start looking for home listings, you’ll often have to drill down through several pages to get past the listings for home mortgage companies, a few dozen single realtors, several realty listing sites that only lead to more realty listing sites – in other words, all the flotsam that floats to the top of the search engines. By going directly to a real estate directory, you’ll cut out the sifting through pages of unrelated info and get straight to what you’re looking for – an indexed directory of current real estate listings that makes it easy to find the homes you want to buy.

Finally, the best real estate directory doesn’t stop with providing listings of homes for sale like many realtor sites do. You’ll find listings for web sites that tell you how to prepare your home for sale, how to put your home on the market, which home improvements offer the most ROI (return on investment, of course), mortgage and loan companies and so much more.