House hunting is easy….right?

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NOTE: This is NOT a sponsored post. It's simply a personal experience.

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Mo and I will have been married for 8 years in May. Would you believe we’ve moved 5 times over the course of our marriage? Did I mention we did it with 2 kids?  Life itself was often the driving force behind why we moved every time, and we always used a realtor to help us with our purchases/rentals.

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It felt like a game. I remember walking into a house and knowing within the first 30 seconds whether it was a good fit for us or not(our realtors loved how decisive we were..haha)

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Even with all that experience, our last rental was a“stressful” one. We were in a 1 year lease that was coming up to expiry, and our landlord had decided to move back in, meaning we were on the lookout for a new property. We had about 2 months to find a new rental at a time when the real estate market, specifically rentals, was extremely hot. We went to see a number of properties, and even when we decided to submit a rental application, we would lose out to someone who had seen it just before us (often with an insane prepayment offer).

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The name of the game was speed. We had to stay on top of finding a new property. Our mornings, lunches and evenings were spent scrolling through a variety of real estate listing websites, all with the intent to find something that fit our needs - and to work with our realtor to secure it.

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Enter Zolo. It’s a simple app that allows you to see listings by city/town and you can sort by when they’ve been listed (we always looked at the most recent). I remember texting Mo the address of a property I found, and he said he couldn’t find it. We went back and forth for a few minutes until it hit me – he was on www.realtor.ca, which wasn’t showing the listing yet (light bulb moment!). I’d likely attribute it to some processing delay, but that meant Zolo enabled us to find out about properties the minute they were listed (vs. alternative websites).

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Zolo became our new default real estate app. Within 72 hours, we found a new property that fit our needs, booked a showing within 30 minutes of it being listed, and secured our new rental that same day after we were the first to see it!

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PS: Mo and I just purchased a new home, so we’ll be moving…yet again – stay tuned!

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