I can't speak for everyone but for my wife and me, looking for our first new home was as exciting as anything could be. Fleeing the nest of our parents and building one of our own was just an exhilarating experience for us young lovers. Of course, back then we had no real pressures, time was on our side, we knew out budget, and both families were right behind us ready to offer support, advice, and practical gifts in order to get us off to a grand start. Yep, the first ever home search was fun all the way. Unfortunately, it's a different ball game when you're ready to move on to your second home, and especially if there's a young family to consider into the move.

In fact, when we were ready to move for the second time, it was not so much a 'moving in' experience, but a 'moving on' one. It became a big upheaval for the entire family, which by this time were my wife and our 2 young children. The new baby had no idea what was going on, but our 3 year old lad seemed deeply upset about leaving behind all the people, places and things that had become so familiar to him in his world. This upset my wife greatly and she too, was getting stressed out about moving in to the unknown. We had been so happy here, but we needed more space and so a new home search was inevitable.

It's often said that moving house is perhaps one of the most stressful things a person can go through, and we can fully relate to that. Apart form the costs of moving and the additional cost of the mortgage, there's also the time and preparation involved, let alone the uncertainties of whether you'll take to your new home and the surrounding environment.

We decided that our next home was to become the permanent family home and with a little luck, we would find a place that we would be happy to spend the rest of our lives in. This meant we were perhaps going to have to spend a little more than first anticipated and so the early days would require a bit of sacrifice financially, as we needed to allow for the growth of the family, yet still have room for overnight guests.

When we set off to do our first homes search as a young engaged couple, we had to trudge around the city and surrounding areas on our free days looking at one place after another. Back then this wasn't a problem, as we had lots of free time and no kids to consider. Actually, thinking back, this was all part of the fun! If we had to do that this time around, it would have been a home search from hell. Thank goodness for the World Wide Web! Fortunately the internet has taken a whole lot of stress out or this painful task for parents with young children. Once we got familiar with doing home searches online, we became a lot let hassled by the experience, and the thought of moving began to feel a little excitable once again.

My wife (who is the computer expert in our house), found a couple of great local websites which enabled us to do some pretty comprehensive home searches online. We were able to really break down the search options with such things as location, rooms, size, and price. In fact, you name it, we could search by it and what wasn't available through the search facilities was usually covered in the descriptions.

There are also some pretty comprehensive property portals out there too, that cover all manner of things like, mortgage rates, lenders, locations, realtors etc. Perhaps 2 of the best ones we found were realtor.com and fishforhomes.com.

One thing is for certain, you no longer have to put all your home search options into the basket of a chosen real estate agent. All the ground work and short-listing can be done from the comfort of home by you, and once you're ready for the formalities, you can arrange all the other stuff as and when.