Home Buying (Part 2) - House Hunting

So I figured out how much I can efford on a house. Then I went on deciding what all things I should look for in a house.

1. Location - This is one big thing. I came accross some very beautiful houses, but in a rundown neighbourhood. Be sure that how much ever perfact that house is, it will lose its value very soon being in such a neighbourhood. Keep away from such houses. Do you need a public transport? Is this house close it? How about schools? Grocery stores? Hospitals?
2. Features - Look at every aspect of the house. Imagine yourself leaving in the house. Is lighting enough? Does each room have anough privacy? Is kitechen sink in right location !! Yes such little things will also become very important when you start leaving there. This is long time commitment you are making and you do not want to rush into it.
3. Lifestyle - This is again goes with features. If you need a office space or extra bedroom. Do you need a media room or a game room.
4. Size and floor plan - Decide on your needs and see how big house and what kind of floor plan you need. If have guest staying with you often, probably a two story home with master bedroom upstair and a guest bedroom with full bath downsteir will give you much needed privacy.

After deciding on my criteria for a house, here are the websites I used to search for houses.

One of the best sites I found was realtor.com

http://www.realtor.com/

Thsi site lets me search by city/zip code. What I did not though that it does not allow me to search by subdivision. We are looking for specific subdivision and we had to go by zip code and then see if house belongs in subdivision that I need.
Yes this site had biggest database of house that I could see.

There was another site.

http://www.ziprealty.com/

It it kind of similar to realtor.com but it also shows subdivision level information. (Does not let you search by it though!!) But makes it much easier to view all the specifications of the house. I kind of liked this site better than realtor.com in terms of ease of searching, but they still need to build a bigger datastore.

So after two months of search we have figured out which house we like and we are ready to put contract !! Next step -> What to make sure while bidding on a house.