When My Artskills Came in Handy--Searching Within a School District

I had clients not too long ago that wanted to find a home in Vienna, VA. After renting there for a year they fell in love with this little town which is right off the end of the Metro's Orange Line (Vienna/ Fairfax/GMU). They knew exactly what they wanted in a home: rambler with addition or split level, flat yard, within walking distance from Maple Ave, etc. However, one of the most important features is that the home had to be located within one of four school districts which they had also ranked. They had done their due diligence on the schools and they wanted their little girls to attend one of the following: Louis Archer, Cunningham Park, Flint Hill, and Vienna Elementary Schools.

The difficulty for a Realtor to find a school within a school district is that many listing agents do not provide that information. There is a good reason why some may not include it: they don't want to be held liable if the information is wrong or if it changes during the time period the house is listed so many times they will just write "call the school district." I knew that setting up a search within the MLS based on the fields for school information would result in incomplete data. On the other hand, setting up a search for all of Vienna or a large portion of Vienna would include too many homes that were not in one of those four school districts. I certainly wouldn't want my clients to call the district for every home that turned up in a search (and for liability purposes, we Realtors also shy away from calling the school districts ourselves). So what did I do?

I put my artskills to good use. I went to the county website and looked up the school districts map for each of my client's preferred schools. MLS allows us to do a map search and basically draw out an area with the mouse if we choose to. Carefully, I copied the school district map onto the MLS map using my mouse, purposefully making the boundaries on my map a little bigger than the county map. It was painstainkingly slow --but the work was definitely worth it (and although my clients may not have known exactly how I was able to do it, I know they appreciated it). It did make me wonder why the school districts can't be drawn out in simple squares and rectangles, instead they have so many twists and turns which made the process a little more difficult (but I am not complaining, I love this job :o)).

Once each map was successfully copied, I saved the search within each map including the other criteria. I explained to my clients that the results would not be perfect and approximately 10% of the results would not be in the desired district so I recommended that they double check with the school district by either calling or at least looking up the address on the county website. However, doing all the work on the front end, would drastically reduce the number of properties to worry about. All in all, I think we only visited about 4 houses before they found the one--because we were able to eliminate so many others beforehand. And with two small children, looking at dozens and dozens of properties was definitely not in their game plan.