Lake Chapala real estate on the internet

A group of realtors in the Lake Chapala area have their listings at http://mlsmexico.com/chapala/index.html, which is a very useful and informative site. It's how we found the house we are buying! I have the impression that most lakeside realtors are members of this group. It is a sign of the professionalism of the realtors AT LEAST POTENTIALLY if they are members.

The part of the site that we used the most was the "Search Properties." Clicking on that takes you to a page where you can choose all listings or new listings, each category divided into residential and lots. Clicking on one of these takes you to a search form. You can limit your search here, or just click on the search button in the lower right to see a list of everything. On that list, first the properties for sale in pesos are given. (The peso is about 10.5 pesos to the US dollar as I write this.) After them, the places for sale in US dollars are listed, and there are a lot more of them. For each item on the list, there is a link with its ID number. I right-click on those and open them in a new tab in Firefox, or you can open a new window in your browser if it doesn't have tabs.

Now you're at a standard MLS form for that property, which may or may not be fully filled out. In the bottom left there should be a link to the realtor's website, and often there is a lot more information there.

I don't know how often this is updated, but some of the properties we looked into were under contract and not yet taken off the listings.

Here's another tip: once you are at a particular realtor's website, it's worth poking around for things that may not yet be in MLS or where the form didn't really describe the place well. In doing this at one website, we noticed it had four pages of home listings but you could only navigate by going to the bottom of page one to get to page two, etc. This became even more of a treasure hunt when we noticed that on some of the pages there were large blank spaces so it would be easy to think you were at the end of a page when most likely a property that had sold had simply been deleted without the white space being taken off the page.

This MLS website also has several other links to interesting commentary and resources about the area.