Are you in the market for a new home in the Austin area? If so, you will find this tutorial on Austin homes extremely helpful.

Below, we have gathered a variety of tools to help you located Austin, Texas homes for sale within your geographic and budgetary ranges. But that’s not all. We have also assembled a variety of tips to help you find, evaluate and purchase the Austin home that’s right for you!

Choosing an Austin Neighborhood

Before you start shopping for Austin homes for sale in a particular area, you obviously need to know what area you want to live in. This is where neighborhood research comes into the picture. Starting with the neighborhood first is the key to finding a home in Austin that you’ll love. To help you in that regard, we have gathered some helpful resources:

• Map of Austin neighborhoods
• Another list of neighborhoods in Austin
• Crime data by neighborhood
• Neighborhood planning / zoning

Researching Austin Schools

Researching Austin homes for sale is not complete until you have also researched the schools in the area where you plan to buy. This is important even if you don’t have any school-aged children, because schools will play a big role in the property value / resale value of your Austin home. Of course, if you have school-aged children, it’s even more important to do some homework in this area … pun intended.

The bottom line is this. Before buying a new home in Austin you need to know about the local schools. Here are some helpful links to get you started:

Austin Public Schools

• High schools
• Middle schools
• Elementary schools
• Private schools in Austin

Austin Colleges & Universities

• University of Texas at Austin
• Austin Community College
• Concordia University
• St. Edward’s University
• Texas State University

Additional Resources

• Top-rated Austin schools
• Private schools, charter schools, etc.
• School reports at Yahoo (enter city name)
• School info at About.com

Finding Austin Homes for Sale

So now you’ve narrowed down your home search to a certain area of Austin that you like, and you’ve researched the schools in that area and found them to your liking. Now what? Well, you do a search for Austin homes for sale within that area.

Here are some websites you should visit in your search for an Austin home:

• AustinHomeSearch.com - This website is a service of the Austin Board of Realtors. So as you might expect, it is a comprehensive and up-to-date listing of homes for sale in the area. To search for available properties in Austin, Texas, simply click on the the “Find a Property” link in the main menu, and then follow instructions from there to narrow your home search.
• Statesman.com - The Austin homes section of the Austin American-Statesman website has a pretty nice tool to help you search for properties. As with any good home-search tool, you can enter a variety of criteria to narrow your search, such as price range, location, number of bedrooms / baths, type of home you prefer, etc.
• Trulia.com - Trulia is one of the new breed of home search websites that have sprung up in the last few years. These sites are highly competitive with one another, which works out well for you because they are always adding new features to their search tool.

We hope this tutorial on buying Austin homes has helped to make your research process a little easier, and we wish you luck finding the home for sale that’s just right for you!