New iPad Tools Ease the House Hunter's Search

Looking to buy a home this spring? There are plenty of new real estate search tools designed to make your home search a whole lot easier. In the old days, house hunters relied on newspaper classified listings and brokers to hone in on properties that fit their criteria. These days, smartphones, tablets and PCs do all the heavy lifting for you. AOL Real Estate test-drove a few of the latest real estate apps, and here's what we found.

Realtor.com, the listings site of the National Association of Realtors, just introduced its new iPad app. Among the cool features included in the free download is a function that lets you select an area to target in your search just by drawing a line around it on a map. The app also allows you to highlight properties of interest, as well as rate them and post your comments in real time as you're looking at them.