So Many Ways To Search For Olympia Area Home Listings By Location

When buyers decide it is time to buy a home in the Olympia, WA area, often one of the first criteria they have in mind is the location they want for that home. And that is great because our MLS gives us quite a few different ways to search so that we can pinpoint homes for sale in the location(s) the buyer wants.

For example, the MLS is divided into numbered code areas and all listings have this geographic coding attached to them. Our codes within Thurston County look like this:

441 - The Steamboat Island peninsula and Summit Lake area (NW area of the county)

442 - Delphi area to the SW (includes Capitol Forest area)

443 - Tumwater area

444 - Cooper Pt area and westside Olympia

445 - Boston Harbor peninsula area

446 - Johnson Pt area and Hawks Prairie

447 - Capitol campus area and close in eastside Olympia

448 - More of the eastern parts of Olympia and western parts of Lacey

449 - SE of Lacey along Yelm Hwy & East Olympia

450 - Central Lacey south of I - 5

451 - Farther east in Lacey to county border

452 - Far SE section of Lacey and outskirts

453 - Yelm & Rainier (farthest SE section of county)

454 - Tenino & Bucoda (central south section of county)

455 - Rochester & Grand Mount (farthest SW section of county)

Now that's a handy search tool for agents - but buyers are more often thinking in terms of other location descriptions - a particular town, a particular school district, zip code, subdivision or neighborhood, a 10 mile radius from work ...

And those kind of searches are possible as well - we are able to search MLS by all of those parameters and more. And since very often school district boundaries and city boundaries are not one and the same, a buyer's agent will be asking lots of questions about not only where a buyer wants to live, but which exact particulars are important - or not.

One especially handy tool is a mapping function we can use to draw a search boundary that takes in several neighborhoods to fine tune the searching. This drawing feature even allows us to draw a general shape of where we want to include listings, then exclude certain streets or neighborhoods within the larger area.

The bottom line is that however the buyer defines locations where they'd like to find a house to buy, the buyer's agent can help create a search that zeroes in on the homes for sale in that area the buyer has selected.