Looking back at how we used to find houses in Edmonton before the internet took over

I remember back in the late 90s, my wife and I would get the Edmonton Journal on Saturday and spend the whole morning circling listings in the real estate section with a red pen. We'd drive around for hours on Sunday, trying to find those houses just from the address and a tiny black and white photo. We missed so many good places because the paper only showed a fraction of what was out there. The big change hit around 2005 when Realtor.ca really got going and we could finally see pictures of every room online from our computer. It saved us weeks of driving all over Mill Woods and Clareview looking at duds. Now my kids are looking at 3D tours on their phones before they even think about leaving the house. Does anyone else miss the feel of those newspaper pages, or was it just a huge pain?

4 comments

4 Comments

kelly_coleman613mo agoMost Upvoted

My uncle told me he used to call a special phone number for a recorded message that listed new properties in Sherwood Park. It updated every Thursday and you had to write down the addresses really fast. I mean, trying to remember all those details from a robot voice sounds like a nightmare.

reese_bell19d ago

@"kelly_coleman61" Did that recording cut off before you could finish writing down the key info like price or square footage? It makes you realize how much we take for granted being able to scroll through photos and floor plans on our own time. I bet @the_miles was probably one of those people who showed up with a notepad full of numbers and still got the wrong address.

the_miles3mo ago

Honestly, the real pain was trusting those tiny photos and then showing up to a place that looked nothing like it. You'd drive across the city only to find the "spacious yard" was a postage stamp or the "needs some TLC" meant the roof was caving in. The internet saved us from a lot of those wild goose chases, even if it took some of the adventure out of it.

jordan13419d ago

Man, that's wild! It reminds me of how my cousin @kelly_coleman61 once told me her dad would drive around neighborhoods looking for "for sale" signs with little flyers you could pull from a box. Half the time the flyers were gone or soaked from rain. But hey, at least you got some exercise walking up to the house to peek in the windows (assuming you didn't trip over a sprinkler). The whole mystery box approach to house hunting definitely had its own kind of charm, even if it wasted a ton of gas.