Home shopping made easily online

COEUR d'ALENE - Let the mouse find the house. A new website offered as a service of Windermere Coeur d'Alene Realty lets anyone shopping for a new home shop by city, neighborhood and builder.

COEUR d'ALENE - Let the mouse find the house.

A new website offered as a service of Windermere Coeur d'Alene Realty lets anyone shopping for a new home shop by city, neighborhood and builder.

"Windermere represents a lot of neighborhoods," said Duffy Smock, associate broker at the real estate company's Hayden office. "With new construction projects, historically searching has been difficult. You have to know who has it, and know the neighborhood. It is a cumbersome process."

With the introduction of www.BuildCda.com, prospective homebuyers can shop at least 15 different neighborhoods and a similar number of builders in Coeur d'Alene, Post Falls, Hayden, Hayden Lake, Rathdrum and Dalton.

Using Google Earth, the website provides an aerial view of the area, and pinpoints the neighborhoods where homes and lots are available. Zooming in gives a detailed view of the streets leading to each.

The site is only a little over a week old, and soon will be upgraded to provide buyer resource information.

"Building a house can be foreign," Smock said.

Information on the types of homes in each development, along with lot sizes, plat maps, and specific covenants, conditions and restrictions such as street parking can be found at the site.

"The genesis was, it is hard to search for new construction, for Realtors or buyers, showing up and hoping to find someone to give information," Smock said.

Buyers can also bring their own builder to a development, and the site is not cluttered with "partners"

The website is useful for buyers and agents, simplifying the search process for all, he said.

"You can look at 20 neighborhoods in less than an hour," Smock said.

Useful for local and out-of-area shoppers is detailed information including statistics and histories on the cities, climate, driving distances and contacts for government agencies.

The site also shows what comes standard with each home and the price, and provides a form shoppers can fill out, checking off upgrades. It can then be printed out and edited to suit needs and budgets, and delivered to an agent, a builder and a lender to help streamline the home-buying process, he said.

"It beats spending days driving around," Smock said. "It takes away a lot of the guessing."