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Real Estate searching by mobile phone
22 September 2008, 10:20am
Los Angeles, CA, USA - In the middle of the US house price slump, firms still rush to develop software and Web sites to turn mobile phones into ‘divining rods’ for real estate listings and neighbourhood information, intensified with the rise in Web-capable phones. The latest aspirant to mobile real estate search domination is San Francisco-based Trulia.com. In August, they launched Trulia Mobile, a free application that downloads to many popular mobile phone models and then lets users find homes for sale, information on open houses and all sorts of handy details, including the listing price, how many bedrooms the home has and how to contact the seller's agent.
Trulia Mobile also can tap into phones' GPS feature to find listings or open houses nearby. The service also works with Dash Navigation GPS devices for cars, automatically downloading the latest listings data from Trulia's site. Mobile applications by Smarter Agent Inc. also use mobile phone GPS functions. In 2006, the company launched an application for finding information on recently sold homes. Earlier this week, it rolled out a mobile application for finding homes for sale. The results on Trulia Mobile, especially when viewed on the super-sleek iPhone, are compelling.
The search function transitions gracefully between features such as looking for an open house nearby, dialing up a the real estate agent on a specific listing, or pulling up driving directions on Google Maps.
The service culls listings from publicly available data from all the Multiple Listing Services and individual brokerage firms, is available on 80 phone models carried by Sprint and AT&T, and will cost you up to $4.99 a month for unlimited use.
Other companies have made browsing their Web sites on mobile phone Internet browsers easier, so users don't have to download an application to their phones. Among them is Seattle-based Zillow.com. The firm also has launched a version of its online home valuation calculator geared to mobile phone users. Key in the home's address and the site yields property details and a "Zestimate" on the home's value - useful if you spot a house for sale while driving through an unfamiliar neighbourhood and are curious about how much it's worth.
One thing to keep in mind with these mobile listing search tools is they only offer a slice of all the properties on sale at a given time. Searches for listings in the same area on different applications can yield different results.
Try some of the other mobile real estate information services - see the sites below.
Source: MIT Technology Review 2008 from Associated Press
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