from USA Today: Net takes legwork out of house hunt
Real estate industry gets cyber-smart
By Doug Levy, USA TODAY
SAN FRANCISCO - When Megan Goddard found out she was moving
to South Carolina, she logged on to the Internet to find a home. That's the
best way to find apartments and homes in the San Francisco area, she
thought. Why should South Carolina be different?
Goddard tried Web sites for local newspapers, search engines Yahoo,
Excite and AltaVista, and apartment finder Rent.net.
"I found one listing through Yahoo for a beautiful house outside Clemson,"
says Goddard, an environmental scientist. She also e-mailed a few real
estate agents she found on the Internet, "but I haven't gotten any responses
back" after a week. Now she's counting on acquaintances in her
hometown-to-be to help her instead of the Internet.
Goddard's experience is not unique. The real estate industry is moving
onto the Internet, but not as quickly as travel and automotive industries.
While the travel industry is dominated by a few airlines that already shared
information via computerized reservation systems, real estate is a tangled
web of independent contractors. Getting every real estate agent online is a
challenge, but it is happening. A survey by Inman Real Estate News, a
trade publication, this month finds 70% of real estate agents market homes
via the Internet. Of those, most consider the method only "somewhat
effective."
It's the future
Dennis Cronk, president-elect of the National Association of Realtors
(NAR), tells his constituents bluntly: "Agents who are not grasping
technology are making a commitment to retire. If they haven't recognized
the need to be technologically competent, then they will not be able to
compete."
Cronk, who set up a Web site for his Roanoke, Va., realty company in
1996, says the Internet plays a role in up to 20% of some real estate
brokers' business, linking buyers and sellers with agents or buyers with
properties. He says a new NAR survey finds that 23% of potential home
buyers have searched for a home online, up from 18% in 1997 and 2% in
1995. Both the technology and real estate industries are responding with
new Web sites:
Internet portal Yahoo started its real estate services on June 30,
including listings, neighborhood information and online mortgage
applications.
Web sites homebid.com and rbuy.com are developing ways for real
estate agents to auction homes. Homebid.com, which sold 31
Phoenix-area homes in its pilot testing last month, plans a wider rollout in
the fall.
Berkeley, Calif., based ZipRealty.com is developing a fully automated
online real estate company, with plans to launch later this year.
Traffic on Realtor.com, operated for NAR by Homestore.com, has nearly
doubled since January. And Web tracking firm Nielsen/NetRatings
estimates that users are spending about 46 minutes on the site, up from 22
minutes in March. "The category has grown beyond anyone's
expectations," says Ian Morris, group product manager for Microsoft's
HomeAdvisor. Microsoft initially planned most of HomeAdvisor's revenue
from loan origination commissions but now earns a considerable amount
from online ads, Morris says. Microsoft does not release specific revenue
figures for HomeAdvisor.
The potential benefit for buyers, sellers and renters is enormous. If enough
listings are searchable via the Internet, nobody needs to waste time looking
at a home that doesn't have enough bathrooms or is in an undesirable
neighborhood. Plus, online real estate sites such as HomeAdvisor and
Realtor.com offer information about crime, demographics and schools -
the kind of information that home buyers couldn't easily gather before.
Moving pictures
Also, more real estate agents are using the Internet to offer far more
information than has been available in multiple listing databases used for
years to share listings with counterparts. Instead of static photographs,
some post videotaped "virtual tours."
"We don't think the real estate agent is going away anytime soon," says
Kevin McCurdy, founder of Bamboo.com, which runs a network of
videographers in the USA and Canada and sells virtual tours to real estate
agents. "This is a listing tool that helps agents run their business more
efficiently."
Real estate publisher Bradley Inman says real estate agents are catching
on. "The only gap here is a learning curve. You have to integrate these
tools into people's lives." Inman recently started HomeGain.com, a site
intended to help home sellers shop for a real estate agent.
Lennox Scott, president of John L. Scott realty in Seattle, spends
$600,000 a year on the Internet, which he calls "the centerpiece of our
marketing."
Scott's customers Chris and Michelle Hill were about to give up on finding
a home in the Seattle neighborhood they wanted. "We stopped looking in
the area because I thought we were priced out," says Chris Hill, chef at the
Coho Café in suburban Redmond. Then, his brother suggested searching
online. He found other homes in the area selling at prices in the target
range, and now, Chris, Michelle and cats Rizzo and Mr. Toots are in a
new home.
Cronk sees virtual tours and other technology boosting real estate business
overall in the next few years, although he thinks high-speed Internet access
needs to come before major changes occur. He likens it to weekend open
houses that motivate people to buy or sell a home even when they weren't
making plans to. "Consumers have greater access to information about
buying homes. It's easier to gather information. That spurs the process."
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