When Boston computer consultant Thomas Canty went house hunting in San Diego a few months ago, he never left Massachussetts. Yet he looked at nearly 25 listings, comparing bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens and landscapes.
When Canty finally bought a $242,500 pink stucco Mediterranean home, almost the entire transaction was conducted on the Web.
Canty is one of a new breed of relocating home buyer, a group being wooed heavily by major realty firms that want to hook and sell the online buyer.
With relocation a lucrative $22 billion market, representing 500,000 Americans annually, firms ranging from Century 21 to moving companies are beefing up their Internet sites in a concerted effort to draw in as much of this business as possible.
The quest for content on these sites is bringing out a number of new information services offering such data as school scores, crime ratings and comparable sales listings.
Some sites also are benefiting from new advances in online photography, which can be used to virtually show a home to a potential buyer via the Internet. Using digital photos on the Web, people can check out possible homes and eliminate those that don’t meet their needs.
If they live across town or across the country, buyers can view houses again and again instead of relying on memory.
But it is sophisticated mapping technology that real estate experts say will be the next major advancement on the real estate Web. Maps can show where the crime rate rises and falls and where a potential house is in relation to schools, shopping and businesses.
Relocating buyers who know the neighborhood in which they want to live can view dozens of houses without leaving home or the realty agent’s office, saving huge amounts of time for both buyer and the agent.
What these new developments mean is that the days of a couple flying into a strange town and looking at 60 houses in two days, hoping to find something they both like, will be gone forever.
Companies moving employees would see drastically lower relocation costs because employees wouldn’t need to be moved into temporary housing, and then moved again a few months later after finding a house.
Using the same technology, a business needing to move into a larger space could search for a building that meets its needs in terms of space, amenities, highway access and other qualifications.
