Click! A Web Browser Buys a Virtual Home

When it comes to buying a home, the Internet may never replace Sunday afternoon visits to an open house, but it sure can make house-hunting a lot easier.

I may be one of the first people in Los Angeles to rely solely on the Internet to find and buy a condominium.

Since I wasn’t even thinking of purchasing a home, God must have been smiling in Realtor heaven the day I noticed the tiny type in the Prudential-Jon Douglas Co. real estate ad inviting me to search “Properties Online” at their new World Wide Web address, www.prudouglas.com

Revving up my browser, I soon found myself greeted by a photo of a house (well, a mansion, really, just perfect for a presidential summit conference or a papal summer home) and instructions for testing the new site.

The main menu displayed five options: property search, office/agent search, real estate updates, company services and e-mail / page / fax.

I selected property search and found myself confronted with a map of California colorfully sliced into six horizontal zones: Sonora/Napa counties, San Francisco/Marin/Bay Area counties, Santa Barbara/Ventura counties, Los Angeles County, Orange County/Inland Empire and San Diego County.

A click on “Los Angeles County” brought the next menu--and a chance to begin fantasizing about my new home. Here I was invited to choose the neighborhood I wanted to live in from a menu that offered entries as broad as San Bernardino County and San Fernando and as narrow as South Pasadena and Wilshire Corridor.

Multiple choices were allowed, so I checked off a few areas in and around my then-current residence of Laurel Canyon, including Beverly Hills, Sunset Plaza and West Hollywood.

The next page asked me to get even more specific. Did I want to search for a house? A condo? Residential income property? Land? A land subdivision? A lease? A project under construction?

How many bedrooms did I want? 1? 3? 10? I could fill in a range of choices.

And about price--how much did I want to spend? Less than $50,000? Less than $150,000? Less than $50 million? (Yes, a real choice.)

I checked off that I was looking for a one- or two-bed-room condo for $150,000 or less and pressed the search key.

Less than a minute later, I was staring at a list of perhaps 20 properties that met all my search criteria. Each line of the listing contained information on the number of bedrooms, the number of bathrooms, the asking price and the street address.

At this point, I must admit, the virtual sales experience began to be something more than merely an intellectual exercise. I was surprised at the number of condos I found in my price range (as if I had had a price range when I began) and intrigued at some of the property locations, which included street addresses where I had friends. A slightly wider search brought even more choices--and a decision to look at a few of the more interesting possibilities. My interactive Internet search had, almost against my will, piqued my curiosity.

At this crucial moment, however, the cyber-connection broke down. In the early version of the Web site I was accessing, I didn’t see any easy way to find the broker connected with the properties I wanted to see. E-mail to the address listed at the bottom of the Web page went unanswered, and a call to the (800) 833-RELO number connected me to a rude, clueless woman who didn’t know anything about local sales agents. I reverted to my handy Yellow Pages to find a nearby Prudential-Jon Douglas broker. I could have used another brokerage firm, but the PruDouglas Web site had made shopping so fun I decided to reward the company for its innovation.

(The current Web site has in part corrected this deficiency. Although it doesn’t say so anywhere, clicking on the address of a particular property in the search result’s list now brings up the name, photo and phone number of a sales agent and a more detailed description of the premises in question.)

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My broker, Tony Aable-- a cheery fellow, thin from the recent drought of real estate buyers--didn’t even know his company had a Web site, but he was game to show me the properties I wanted to see. Cross-checking my list against one generated by the Multiple Listing Service (a sales-agent-only database of available properties), Aable was able to come up with only two additional properties.

Although the thoroughness of the cyber-list amazed both my agent and me, Kristine Miklusec, the vice president and executive director of marketing at Prudential-Jon Douglas, later warned that the Internet list is not comprehensive.

“Every Prudential-Jon Douglas property is on our site, but not every Multiple Listing Service property. However, in West L.A. we have such a huge market share, the listings may seem the same.”

Although promised for the future, none of the properties I wanted to inspect had a photograph posted on the Web page, and my physical inspections unveiled the usual number of bizarrely shaped, dreary spaces with problems glossed over in the usual optimistic Realtor descriptions (“Bright! Airy! City views!”).

Sometimes, too, the listings were flatly in error. A few “Hancock Park” listings, for instance, proved to be far south of the center of that community, and occasional missing information in the list fields caused studio apartments to show up in my search of one- and two-bedroom condos.

More important, though, my ability to quickly and easily search cyberspace for properties meeting my buying criteria helped me unearth a number of prospective homes with an ease and a speed that immediately engaged me.

Further investigation of available property information on the Internet turned up little.

One surprisingly handy resource, however, proved to be a searchable electronic version of L.A.’s Recycler newspaper (www.recycler.com), which contained hundreds of classified home sales listings, including for-sale-by-owner properties.

In just a few short days of looking I had seen most of the available homes in my buying area and had decided to actually purchase, if the price was right.

I made an offer on a two-bedroom two-bath condo on a quiet street in West Hollywood. After the usual dickering, the seller and I came to terms on a price and, less than a month after first contacting the PruDouglas Web site, I was in escrow.

The whole process was so quick and painless that my friends thought I had succumbed to the Ultimate Impulse Buy. Quite the contrary: Armed with so much information about the local real estate market, I felt equipped to make an informed decision without fear that some new and better bargain would turn up somewhere, if I just kept looking.

Apparently I’m not the only person ready for the cyber-home-shopping experience, for the Prudential-Jon Douglas Web site, formally launched on June 9, is averaging 27,000 visits a day, and company Chairman Jon Douglas is expecting business to grow.

“At first we were a little concerned about the loss of control of our listing information, but we decided that we had to be on the Internet,” Douglas said. “I think if we can give a customer access, get our properties exposed, get people to give us a call, we’ll have an edge over our competitors.”

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Adds Miklusec, “Nowadays, the consumer demands as much information as possible, as fast as possible. We want to stay ahead of the curve.”

To my mind, a few changes would make the Prudential-Jon Douglas site even more useful. Because the property database there doesn’t incorporate listings from the Multiple Listing Service, the site is not nearly as comprehensive as it could be, especially in areas beyond Prudential-Jon Douglas’ L.A. stronghold. No information is provided on recent neighborhood sales; without data on sales prices of comparable properties, there is no immediate way for a buyer to determine whether an asking price is fair. Finally, the promised photos should be attached to every listed property, a task Miklusec says is underway.

Since the Internet is such a new resource for finding and buying real estate, there will probably continue to be glitches while the various realty brokerages come up to speed online. But even so, finding a home in cyberspace proved to be a fast and painless process that took me from home browser to home buyer in just a few weeks.