Planning for retirement can take years. From dreaming of how you’ll fill your days to finding the ideal home base, there are a range of decisions to be made. Thanks to several online real estate websites, researching real estate is now easier than ever before, particularly for retirees. If you’re in the process of deciding where to live in retirement, be sure to check out these easy to use real estate websites.

Zillow

Zillow’s online real estate search is built around map-based search capabilities for home value estimates. These accurate home values are derived from a proprietary formula that includes public records of home sales, tax assessors, and some MLS services. In certain markets, Zillow’s data on homes that are in pre-foreclosure status can also be helpful online estate planning.

Trulia

Trulia also pulls data from a range of sources. Many people find their heat maps valuable when researching specific neighborhoods. Using these maps you can look at crime rates, schools, commute times, and amenities such as banks and grocery stores in this area. It’s simple to set up and save search criteria. Trulia can send you suggested homes, as well as alerts on new listings or homes you have followed.

Redfin

While Zillow and Trulia are most useful for researching neighborhoods and keeping an eye on specific listings, Redfin is actually an online real estate brokerage and has real estate agents as employees. Redfin offers dedicated service, while making the most of technology to enable largely online real estate transactions. Enjoy lower commissions, fewer fees, and in some cases rebates when you work with Redfin.

Realtor.com

Realtor.com is the online real estate site run by the National Association of Realtors. Head here for the most up-to-date information on listings directly from the MLS, but don’t expect the fancy graphics and maps available on the other sites listed above.

If you’re considering a move in retirement, enjoy browsing these fun and easy to use online real estate websites.

What's Mom's password? Online accounts and estate-planning headaches

AUGUSTA DWYER

Special to The Globe and Mail

Last updated Wednesday, Dec. 02, 2015 8:08AM EST

Last year in Britain, brothers Josh and Patrick Grant made the news when their spat with tech giant Apple Inc. went public. Patrick Grant had inherited his late mother’s iPad – but not its password. Neither a death certificate, a copy of the will, nor a lawyer’s letter stating he was co-executor of the will would make the firm budge. A court order would have cost him hundreds of pounds.

While Apple finally relented, the Grants’s case highlights the increasingly complicated issue of digital legacies. Online banking, investing and other activities are convenient, but they can cause headaches for heirs when not included in estate planning.

“The issue of managing finances that have been stored electronically is much more common than 10, or even five, years ago,” said Suzana Popovic-Montag, managing partner at Hull & Hull LLP, a Toronto-based firm that specializes in estate and trust planning.

As the executor of a will, she added, “if you don’t know the password, or the user ID, you can’t get into it.”

Without such information, she said, “we are going to have delays. We are going to have situations where individuals may insist on probate to prove that you have access to these accounts. Or you might have to get a court order.”

Online bank accounts are only one aspect of the problem, said Leanne Kaufman, head of Royal Bank of Canada Estate and Trust Services and a member of the Society of Trust and Estate Practitioners. “It could include intellectual property that is only on someone’s hard drive, or if they were a writer, or had photographs that they consider intellectual property.

“It could also include, believe it or not, avatars in online worlds and games that may actually have inherent value, that can be sold or traded, and that may be an asset of the estate, if it has sufficient value.”

Estate planners should create a list, says Ms. Popovic-Montag. “Here’s what I have, and here’s how you access it. It means sitting down and thinking of every single thing that you do on the computer, that you do remotely or somehow access through social media.”

The problem, however, is that users frequently update their passwords or switch accounts. “It’s not static information,” said Ms. Kaufman. “It’s dynamic information.”

Not surprisingly, a slew of new companies have set up shop offering to store passwords or sell software allowing users to do so on their own.

Joe Henderson co-founded Minneapolis-based Estate Map, in 2013 together with Chris Huber, a software engineer with a masters from MIT. The company, which “helps you create a comprehensive map of your most important information, assets, and wishes,” was inspired, he said, by the realization that he had photos of his children on a half-dozen websites and devices, many of which his wife could not access.

As an estate attorney, he said, he has watched families “scramble and pull their hair out about their inability to access really basic information. … Real money is left on the table.”

The amounts of money in unclaimed assets is considerable. In the United States, state governments, to which by law unclaimed bank accounts and safe deposit boxes are turned over, are sitting on more than $58-billion worth of assets, Mr. Henderson said. The Bank of Canada reported last year that it was holding nearly a billion dollars in unclaimed bank accounts and unredeemed bonds.

According to Ms. Kaufman, RBC includes “triggers around digital assets” in its planning materials for clients.

People who are planning their estate should be seeking advice about online accounts and digital assets from a lawyer or financial adviser, said Ms. Popovic-Montag.

“We have seen a trend toward people who are doing estate planning also talking about a digital will,” she said, “and creating an infrastructure to deal with that. Like saying, ‘I want a digital executor, someone who is computer savvy to be able to deal with my accounts.’”

Mr. Henderson says, “We are just now as a society beginning to realize that this is a growing problem. I think 10 years from now it is going to be a rule,” he said, “and people will think of this even before they think of doing a will.”