www.house hunt : The Internet is rapidly becoming a real estate supermarket as buyers, sellers link up, ready to deal

As soon as Scott and Katie Chapman found out that Scott’s new job would be taking them to Los Angeles from Los Alamos, N.M., they began planning their move.

The Chapmans hoped to find a house in a South Bay beach community, and they launched their hunt by turning to an increasingly popular tool, their computer.

Scott Chapman was already using the Internet in his work as an engineer, and the couple had a modem on their home computer, giving them access to the Internet, the World Wide Web and the universe of online real estate.

Chapman began by calling up a popular search program called Yahoo, which, with a few computer key strokes, can search the 3 million or so Internet sites on the World Wide Web area of the Internet in just a few seconds. Chapman typed in “real estate” and found housing-related Web sites.

He soon discovered a Web page called Listing Link that specializes in home listings in Los Angeles. By searching Listing Link by city, house size and price range, the Chapmans found eight beach community homes that met their needs.

The listings directed them to Annette Graw, the broker-owner of South Bay Brokers in Manhattan Beach. They spoke to her by telephone and arranged to meet her and visit the eight homes.

After several scouting trips, they found a three-bedroom two-bath home in Manhattan Beach (not one of their original eight online candidates) that they bought last summer for $335,000.

The Chapmans are in the vanguard of a small but growing number of home buyers and sellers who are using the Internet, where a virtual real estate marketplace--fed by more than a million home listings instantly retrievable from cyberspace--is rapidly developing.

By the tens of thousands, consumers and realty, home-building and finance companies, as well as businesses and entrepreneurs from a host of allied fields, are jumping on the Internet to conduct all manner of real estate transactions: buying, selling, lending, insurance, appraisal, inspection, home repair and at-home research of a variety of realty databases available at a keystroke.

Deals are being made, homes are being sold and the real estate industry is being transformed.

“This is where it’s at,” said Graw, who has her own Web home page and who communicated with the Chapmans during their purchase via e-mail.

Real estate Internet sites are being created at a frenetic pace as realty firms and technology companies join forces to take advantage of the Net. There are an estimated 20,000 real estate-related home pages on the Internet, with as many as 200 more pages being added every week. (The term “home page” sounds like real estate jargon but is not; it describes the opening screen of a specific site on the Web.)

A home page is a company’s (or a person’s) address on the World Wide Web and looks much like the opening menu of many computer programs. Created for as little as $500, home pages can be customized in almost any way. In real estate, they often include lists of properties for sale with a picture or two and such details as size, location and price.

Some home pages are nothing more than a picture, a biography and a phone number, similar to a newspaper display ad. Most have lists of items (called “links”) you can select to go to other pages with more information. Some offer the ability to search their databases for a wide variety of information, including news articles, home listings, mortgage rates, realty company directories and company information.

Real estate giants like Coldwell Banker, Century 21 and Re/Max and Southland companies like Fred Sands and the Prudential Jon Douglas Co. are all jumping on the Internet with home listings and home buying and selling educational services.

Among home builders online are Kaufman & Broad Home Corp., Centex, West Venture Homes, J.M. Peters and the Irvine Co.

With the Internet, home buyers, sellers and investors have astounding amounts of information on home listings, loans, taxes, home values and real estate laws at their fingertips.

For example, take the powerful directory run by the California Living Network, just one of many home listing services online. In collaboration with Santa Monica-based Listing Link, the network offers 300,000 home listings, with many from Southern California. California Living Network is owned by the California Assn. of Realtors.

For example, there are more than 1,000 home listings for the Westside, from a $300,000 condo on Wilshire to a Beverly Hills estate with no price listed.

When asked why he advertised on Listing Link, Clive Kennedy, a broker with Jon Douglas Co. in Beverly Hills, replied, “How could I not? It’s untried territory, it’s not expensive, it may reach tens of millions of Earthlings. . . . Who knows? It’s worth a shot. . . .”

Kennedy listed a $1.25-million house in Beverly Hills with Listing Link and got responses from around the world. He’s so convinced about the future importance of the Internet that he’s set up his own home page.

For some properties, a global exposure is essential.

Home seller Barbara Clarke-Lilly thought the Internet had potential for finding a buyer for her $295,000 Malibu home.

“I was in Hawaii with some friends exploring the Internet, and it occurred to me that since I wanted to sell my place on the beach, it might be a good idea to do it over the Internet,” she said. “It’s a beautiful remote place, and I thought that someone in Hong Kong might appreciate it.”

“What we’re looking for is business people from overseas,” said Pat Campbell, a Realtor and sales advisor for Re/Max Estate Properties in Beverly Hills. “Almost half the houses we sold last year were to foreign business people. We’re finding they are computer literate, they’re up on the Internet, so we decided [to] see if we can get ahold of more of them by putting listings up on the Internet.”

Another online listing service is Home Scout, operated by the Cobalt Group Inc., of Seattle. It includes nationwide listings and information on buying and selling a home.

For homeowners who want to sell their homes themselves, there is the Owner Network site, where sellers can list their property at no charge. If they want to include pictures or other details about the home, however, they must pay upgrade fees of $5 to $20 a month.

Home listings for special market segments are also represented on the Web, including foreclosures, vacation homes and luxury houses.

For example, on Who’s Who in Luxury Real Estate, with a database of 150,000 pages of upscale property, you can bring an English castle, a French chateau and a $60-million Lake Tahoe lodge to your home computer, scanning pictures and descriptions of some of the world’s most spectacular and most expensive homes.

There are limitations with checking home listings on the Internet. For example, some of the listings may not include the addresses of the homes, and the comparative shopping can be tricky because some of the listing services are far from complete.

But listing information is only the beginning. The Internet can be a tool for other information that is vital:

* Home loan borrowers can keep up on the rates and terms of the mortgage market by using the Internet to shop for loans. Two independent sources are financial publishers HSH Associates and Bank Rate Monitor. These services offer local and national information on mortgage rates, and the data are updated daily.

Another source on home loans is the Federal National Mortgage Assn. (Fannie Mae), the government-chartered company that buys home loans on the secondary market, which provides information on mortgages and related subjects as well as such tools as mortgage calculators.

* Tax information is readily available. For example, to understand the full potential of the mortgage interest deduction, home buyers can download Internal Revenue Service form No. 936, “Home Mortgage Interest Deduction,” from the Internet. There are also forms and reports on moving, capital gains when selling and investment-related tax information.

* To help buyers understand more about the value of homes, there are several sources on the Internet, including Dataquick Information Systems of La Jolla or Inpho Inc. of Cambridge, Mass. Both of these services offer ways of tapping huge government databases of property sales but come with a charge of at least $5 per request.

* To find an appraiser for a professional assessment of a home’s value, go to the Appraisal Institute’s home page, which offers a search engine for finding a local member of the institute and access to a real estate library.

* Try the Home Buyers Fair for a directory of cost of living and housing data on 450 U.S. cities, information for first-time home buyers and mortgage data.

* For legal help online, look to Berkeley-based Stratosphere Publishing’s directory of state-by-state real estate rules and regulations. Prepared by author Steve Lyons, the page includes reliable articles and reports on real estate law.

To help sort through the thousands of Web sites, consumers are turning to realty directories, such as IRED News (IRED stands for International Real Estate Directory). Published by computer expert Becky Swann of Grapevine, Texas, the free service has brought some sense to the estimated 20,000 real estate-related home pages. The IRED is organized by state, and within each state, the home pages are listed in alphabetical order.

Although the World Wide Web gets most of the attention today, the Internet also offers less glamorous specialized news groups, which are quickly becoming a popular way for people with similar concerns to meet.

There are newsgroups for virtually every special interest under the sun, including all types of real estate. To participate in a news group, all you need is a modem and e-mail address.

People who are subscribers to these newsgroups, which cost nothing, can receive and send e-mail messages on common bulletin boards. Often a subscriber will post a problem, and a flood of solutions will follow over the next couple of days.

In the real estate area, subscribers can get advice on everything from housing discrimination and pets in apartments to new laws on where to put satellite dishes.

When Bob Redoutey and his neighbors wanted to start a homeowners’ association for their 140-home subdivision in Round Rock, Texas, he sent an e-mail message to an online news group that deals with homeowners associations.

Within two days, Redoutey learned where he could find a qualified homeowners’ association lawyer and found that he would have to pay about $500 to an attorney to prepare a set of bylaws. He also learned that he could purchase a Nolo Press book on nonprofit organizations that includes a sample set of bylaws or he could contact the Community Assns. Institute and purchase a prototype for $17.50.

Before the advent of the Internet and e-mail, Redoutey probably would have made several long distance calls and written several letters before finding out how to prepare a reliable set of homeowner association bylaws.

Real estate educator and journalist Edith Lank advises people using news groups to be careful, however.

Lank, who teaches at St. John Fisher College in Rochester, N.Y., said experts often participate in the forums, but she warns that some of the information can be wrong.

“What’s in text books has been reviewed, what’s in newspapers has been edited and what’s in academic journals has been refereed, but what’s on the Net can be entirely wrong,” Lank said.

Unresolved in the frenzied introduction of real estate into cyberspace are such issues as consumer protection and regulation.

Officials at the California Department of Real Estate routinely browse newspapers around the state, looking for brokers and agents who use dubious advertising, promote illegal property deals or engage in bait-and-switch schemes. But when it comes to the Internet, the department is just beginning to review and investigate real estate promotions on the Web.

So for now, home buyers and sellers should take full advantage of online information but beware of the pitfalls.

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Next Sunday: How a Web browser became a West Hollywood home owner, almost without intending to.