Whether they’re casually browsing or seriously searching, home buyers looking for real estate listings on the Internet have a handy set of tools in the four major listings providers.
Realtor.com, the industry’s own compendium of listings, offers the most volume, with more than a million properties listed by participating Realtors.
HomeScout, which bills itself as a central listing warehouse, is a search engine linked to 250 Web sites and 500,000 properties for sale, including listings from both participating agencies and For Sale By Owner properties.
CyberHomes provides more than 350,000 listings from 40 participating multiple listing services in the U.S. and Canada.
HomeSeekers offers 307,000 multiple listings in 18 states.
But which service really has the goods when it comes to serving both consumers and real estate professionals? It’s a critical question for an industry in the painful process of retooling for a global, consumer-centered future.
Sheer numbers of listings are only as good as the willingness of consumers to scroll through them. Once the novelty of having listings available online wears off, what may really count are extra features that make the home-buying experience more efficient and user-friendly for anyone on the Internet.
The so-called second-tier listing services are reaching out in all kinds of novel ways to connect with consumer preferences, to, as CyberHomes’ Howard Latham says, make the consumer’s interactive experience “one of total satisfaction and first-rate service.”
HomeSeekers, for example, is available in Spanish and English, and also features 360-degree views of some listings. CyberHomes offers interactive street-level mapping, searches by home features, address and area, and the ability to push selected new listings via e-mail to users.
CyberHomes and HomeScout both offer school information. HomeScout also is building state-by-state links to lending, insurance, legal, contracting, landscaping and relocation services. CyberHomes and HomeSeekers both have signed partnership agreements with Yahoo!, the Internet’s largest search engine, to have their listings included in Yahoo!’s classified ads section.
Most people continue to seek help from real estate professionals when they buy a home. And if these front-line professionals are not convinced of the value of online listing services, even that of their own industry’s, can online listing services really expect to grow, bells and whistles notwithstanding?
Orange County, Calif., broker I.M. Calderon’s opinion is not atypical. In his view, real estate agents’ most important job is knowing their individual markets, period.
“We Realtors promote and service local, at best, regional areas,” says Calderon of Calderon Realty. “If I’m in California, what do I know about values in Chicago, Tampa or Seattle? Besides, why would I bother to obtain a real estate license for each state?
“Therefore, I don’t find Realtor.com very helpful to me. I don’t care if it has a million listings on it. If my area only has 5,000 homes on the market, and HomeSeekers has them all, why do I care about the other 995,000 listings covering the rest of the country?”
On the other hand, others in the industry criticize listing services for being too local and not global enough in their reach.
“We have found Realtor.com, HomeScout and others to be very limited in their scope, providing basically very restricted access to U.S. residential homes, period,” says Julie Cecil of Hawaii-based Pacific Island Investments.
“There’s a world of real estate out there: land, farms, apartments, hotels, islands, businesses and other types of properties not nearly adequately covered or presented on the World Wide Web. We, for one, would love to see someone address the truly global adventure of buying and selling real estate, a more investor-oriented site, one that designs for the various products and places that real property falls under.”
But while those like Julie Cecil see the industry not doing enough to help the online real estate consumer, others are concerned that real estate’s rush to the Internet may unintentionally backfire.
“I see this rush to homogenize the process of purchasing a home a technology-driven madness ending in a tremendous backlash by both consumers and agents. Homes are not compact discs and books. Buying a home is still one of the most personal and important decisions in many people’s lives,” says Tim Self, director of The Go Home Network.
For now, however, the online listings race is still on and the outcome unclear. Realtor.com has the lead, but the rest of the horses are coming up fast in the home stretch.
Liz Poppens
Up to date
New-home developments with such traditional elements as sidewalks, grid street patterns and lots of front porches are growing in number, fostered by urban planners, architects, builders and others interested in retooling the American suburban dream.
Now interested consumers can learn about the history and future direction of this kind of community planning, called New Urbanism, via an automated e-mail forum sponsored by the University of Kentucky.
Most of the participants in the listserv forum are academic and architectural experts in the field. List members receive regular e-mails of group discussions, all delivered by e-mail, not online in real time as in a chat room. Members can participate by posting an e-mail, which goes to the group at large for discussion.
The new site, according to the National Multiple Housing Council, is somewhat disorganized, but offers a wide variety of perspectives and expertise on New Urbanism. Consumers interested in joining the forum should e-mail the message “sub CNU (your name)” to listserv@lsv.uky.edu.
Taxing situation
Consumers wondering about tax rates in an area where they are looking at homes now have a way to get them on the Internet.
Property taxes by Zip Code are available almost instantly at Loan Locator’s Web site, www.loanlocator.com. The site gives the property tax rate, assessment rate and transfer and recording tax rate for homes in that area.
Later this month, the site will allow consumers to search for cost-effective loans and apply for a loan online. The site currently offers a variety of calculators, educational and informational resources.
Affordability boosters
Much of affordable housing today is not being built by the federal government but by non-profit developers, community-based agencies and private groups. To help these groups successfully take projects from start to finish, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has launched the HUD Nonprofit Center, an Internet site just for them.
The site, www.hud.gov/nonproft, is a virtual clearinghouse of just about any kind of information related to non-profit housing, and tools for non-profit groups to use. The site contains information tailored to specialists and specialized groups involved in non-profit housing, such as church groups, real estate brokers and attorneys.
There are annotated lists of funding opportunities, national volunteer programs, relevant laws and regulations, HUD homes for sale, and model non-profit housing programs nationwide. There’s also an area devoted to technical assistance and guidance available to housing non-profits.
Because so much of non-profit housing development is tied up with government programs, the site also has a full set of links to federal agencies, departments, the Federal Register, the Library of Congress and the federal, legislative and judicial branches of government.
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Chicago Tribune Homes
Additional real estate information, including a monthly index of Inman News Features, is available at Chicago Tribune Homes on the World Wide Web. Go to chicago.tribune.com/go/homes and click News & Features.
