It is pretty much official, we’ll be moving to Utah this summer assuming the deal on the house closes the way we expect it to. We don’t have a move day yet, probably July if everything works out.
We did a lot of research online before going out there to look at homes. I used two websites for this, BlueRoof.com and UtahRealEstate.com. I found that BlueRoof was really good for locating potential homes in a specific area (thank you Google Maps mashup), but didn’t always have the level of detail about each home that Utah Real Estate did. Fortunately Utah Real Estate did something really smart, they made it easy to view information about a home based on the MLS number. Just go to utahrealestate.com/some_mls_number_here and you’re there. Most of their site isn’t very pretty, but at least they got the clean URL thing going for them.
If you are pondering a similar move, be aware that the real estate and consumer protection laws in Utah don’t appear to be nearly as thorough as California, so do your homework and keep a close on eye the details.