New Hometrader.ca Site Looks Promising

If you are looking to buy a new condo in Toronto, you probably have picked up a copy of The Condo Guide magazine. These free, bi-monthly full colour magazines are more or less 100% advertisements bought and paid for by Toronto’s numerous condo developers with a few “articles” thrown in for good measure by industry insiders.  The magazine is distributed by the Trader corporation and is available on corner newstands all over the city.

Their current website is pretty much useless as a search tool for condo buyers, but they are working on creating a new website called HomeTrader (currently in beta), that so far looks pretty promising. .

I took a look through the site and found that the mapping feature was quite intuitive, granted that there are currently very limited ‘listings’ of new condos available, it could be a great site for new condo buyers to search for and research various condo developments.  Take a look at Hometrader.ca and let me know what you think.

This site to me is far more user friendly and has a better search engine ‘backbone’ than the much maligned new Realtor.ca website. I wrote an article about the new Realtor.ca website for BlogTO back in July of 2008, and that article has now received over 270 comments and was the 7th most viewed article of the year for BlogTO – a blog that publishes thousands of articles every year. Consumers are outraged at the new Realtor.ca and many wish that the Canadian Real Estate Association would simply switch back to the old clumsy yet reliable MLS.ca. The whole situation kind of reminds me of Microsoft’s problems with the public’s acceptance of Vista and many ‘downgrading’ to Windows XP instead of trying to wrestle with the new operating system for PCs.