The playing field between professional and amateur home sellers has been leveled significantly with the launch of HomeScout’s affiliated Internet site, Home on the Web.
The new service gives both real estate agents and consumers the ability to prepare and market property on both the Home on the Web site and through HomeScout, a Seattle-based Internet service that is one of the top four real estate listings providers on the Web (the others are Realtor.com, CyberHomes and HomeSeekers).
Consumers pay $20 per listing for six months; agents pay $15 a month for unlimited listings and unlimited time. The listing format includes multiple photographs, bulleted features, an extensive copy block and pullout sections detailing interior, exterior and neighborhood features. Each listing also tracks how many users have clicked on it.
Listing information, which the customer can edit or update online any time, can be entered from a home or office computer. Photos can either be uploaded by customers themselves or scanned by Home on the Web for an additional charge.
“Home on the Web is a great solution for property sellers with or without a Web site to place their listings online,” said HomeScout’s Patricia Brown. “This system is the most effective and affordable way to accommodate our users who have requested the ability to place their listings directly into the HomeScout search.”
While the site clearly is aimed at both agents and consumers, the new service represents a major new online avenue for consumers who want to sell their own homes. While HomeScout has carried For Sale by Owner (FSBO) listings all along, they have arguably been lost among 500,000 homes in the 250 databases HomeScout searches.
Home on the Web’s major online competitor will be the San Francisco-based Abele Owner’s Network, a highly developed year-and-a-half-old Web site that currently carries 30,000 FSBO listings from around the country. Abele posts a basic listing for free for four months. A standard listing (unlimited copy block and one photo) costs $65 for four months while a premium listing (unlimited copy and multiple photos) runs $115 for four months.
HomeScout is a division of The Cobalt Group. Its website is at www.homescout.com. Abele Owner’s Network is at www.owners.com.
Liz Poppens
Modern investment
Consumers sometimes wonder where the money from a real estate commission goes. An increasing part of that money is being invested in technology to better serve the consumer, a new survey shows.
Every three years the Relo Independent Real Estate Network company surveys its 1,000 broker/owners to see how they’re spending their money.
The company’s latest survey shows that agencies are spending twice what they did in 1990 on technology, up to almost 10 percent of an agency’s total operating expenditures from 3.8 percent six years ago.
Technology expenditures include money spent on computers, communications and multiple listing services.
“In all those areas where we assessed technology expenditures, we saw significant increases and we expect this trend to accelerate,” said Relo vice president/finance Daniel J. Lyons.
Other expense areas remained relatively constant. Agencies spend about 15 percent on advertising, 19 percent on pure operating expenditures, 22 percent on payroll, 12 percent on rent or occupancy costs, 2 percent on training, with the rest going to profit sharing, bonuses and net return, according to the survey.
Channel fishing
Specialty channels are becoming the name of the game for major Internet search engines. By organizing and labeling the enormous amount of data that search engines are capable of grabbing onto, channels help users find what they’re looking for much faster.
Infoseek has joined the crowd with its directory of specialty channels, including one for real estate.
By clicking to the real estate channel, Infoseek users can easily scope out real estate Web sites, which are organized by category: associations, build a home, buy a home, finance a home, home improvement, commercial, property listings, relocating, rentals and reference guides. The property listings category includes most of the heavy-hitters in the field, including Realtor.com, CyberHomes and HomeSeekers.
RentNet, the leading rental listings Web site, heads up the rental category. The International Real Estate Directory (IRED) also will be featured on the site.
The channel also includes recent real estate headlines (with stories) from newspapers and trade publications and quirky home sites, including Driveways of the Rich and Famous, a hilarious look at celebrity homes through the eyes of gardeners, mail carriers and next-door neighbors.
Rounding out the channel are calculators for figuring out a monthly mortgage payment and how much of a home loan one can afford, Realtor sites and Yellow Pages for rentals.
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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.
