internet

 http://www.ononemap.com

It's a brilliant idea!  You take the already useful google maps and add houses that are for sale so you can see at a glance the state of the housing market in whatever area of the country you want.

On opening the map you are presented with the whole of the UK showing you the number of houses for sale in each area.  The system covers houses for sale in England and Wales and also Scotland and Northern Ireland.

You need to zoom into the area that you want by using the plus and minus scale on the top left and at the same time relocating the area in the centre of the screen by left-clicking the mouse button and holding down to drag the map.  If you have not used these maps before then the procedure is quite intuitive and easy to do.  If you want, you can also double-click on the area you want and the map will self-centre.

As you zoom in, white boxes display the numbers of homes registered for sale until you begin to see red individual 'home' symbols that mark the actual houses.

Find an area and a house that you like and click on the red 'home' symbol

Find an area and a house that you like and click on the red 'home' symbol to bring up a thumbnail giving you the road and the price.  If you are still interested you can click the location and be taken to the online estate agent's details in a new tab or window.

Obviously you would like to limit the map to showing just the houses that are of interest within your price range and you can refine your search by using the boxes at the top of the page to narrow the search parameters.

Using the map layers on the right enables you to see some local amenities that might help you decide on an area, although not now, sadly, the flood level overlay which was very interesting.

You can also complete a shortlist of properties that interests you by creating a free account.  This can be very useful since it is all too easy to forget which property you have seen.

It goes without saying that this shows just the property that has been registered by estate agents who participate in the scheme but, at the times when we looked, most areas of the country seem well covered but this does help to explain gaps where no or little property is evident.

Overall it is an incredibly useful resource for locating a house or for browsing to see house prices in other parts of the country.

Tags: review, website