‘Clicky-Loos Welcome’

First, it was Windows; now, it’s the whole house.

This summer Microsoft launched HomeAdvisor (https://www.homeadvisor.com), a Web site that the software giant has designed as one-stop shopping for house hunters.

With HomeAdvisor, Microsoft is challenging a host of existing real estate sites like Realtor.com and ListingLink and may have upped the ante.

Enter HomeAdvisor and you’ll find a variety of home-buying tools and a property listing database.

You can get the skinny on a neighborhood, run calculations on how much you can afford to spend, identify homes to consider based on your defined preferences and even get a loan through participating mortgage lenders.

If you creatively navigate this site, you can even take advantage of Microsoft’s extensive Sidewalk Yellow Pages database to find out where the nearest deli or dry cleaner is in your neighborhood of choice.

Microsoft’s HomeAdvisor site is the biggest and newest among a burgeoning group of realty-related Web sites that are estimated by real estate and technology expert Bradley Inman to number several hundred thousand.

Many of them are produced by real estate agents or offices, and others provide only minimal consumer information.

Inman’s company, Inman News Features, provides editorial content to HomeAdvisor as well as to several other realty sites and to newspapers.

Inman estimated that there are probably a dozen nationally significant realty Web sites, including HomeAdvisor, Realtor.com, Cyberhomes.com and Homes.com.

“Plus there are regional sites that are significant, including the newspaper sites,” Inman said.

The Times’ Homesource (https://www.latimes.com/homesource), for example, lists resale houses, information about newly built homes, home price data, mortgage information and school and community profiles.

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Microsoft hopes to distinguish its HomeAdvisor site from its competitors.

“We’re not just providing listings online,” HomeAdvisor product manager Sara Narbaitz said. “We’re providing the thought behind the process of buying a house, the tools to help you decide and extensive neighborhood information.

“We have the typical tools that other sites have to help find a home, but we take it further.”

Narbaitz said that the advice and tips provided by Inman News Features (which syndicates several columnists used by The Times’ Real Estate section) can help buyers figure out, among other things, how to find a loan and what kind of expenses are associated with it.

And Microsoft’s software allows you to do side-by-side comparisons of loans and computes monthly mortgage payments for each property listing that you download.

There are neighborhood school test scores and crime statistics. You can input your work address and get a map to detail the route and distance between it and the property you’re looking at. And you can sign up to receive e-mail updates of relevant listings as they appear.

But, at this point, be prepared to wait--and wait.

After nine months of actual product development, the new site, launched on Aug. 12, still has some kinks to be worked out.

One of them, Narbaitz admitted, is speed, or the lack of it.

“We’re working on the download time,” she said.

In the meantime, even a high-speed cable modem user endured frustratingly long minutes of inactivity until connections were made and pages finally loaded.

Also, some design features seem distinctly user-unfriendly, such as long lists of properties in the form of a grid that, even using the site’s print button instead of the browser’s, leaves out columns of information--even if it is printed in landscape mode.

Also inconvenient: Many neighborhoods are listed by ZIP Code instead of by name, requiring users to have a Thomas Guide available to see where the properties are.

The number of home listings available on HomeAdvisor also has some catching up to do with established real estate sites, most notably RealSelect Inc.’s Realtor.com (https://www.realtor.com).

Affiliated with the National Assn. of Realtors, Realtor.com has about 95% of available listings in the country, estimated at 1.2 million.

Cyberhomes, another prominent site, has an estimated 75% of the nation’s home listings.

According to Narbaitz, HomeAdvisor has between 400,000 and 500,000 listings online.

And in Southern California, there are big gaps in HomeAdvisor’s listings. Of the half a dozen multiple listing service organizations in Los Angeles and Orange counties, only two have signed up with HomeAdvisor: the Southern California service, representing Orange County and Southeast Los Angeles County, and the Newport Beach service.

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The Southland Regional Assn. of Realtors, which covers the San Fernando Valley, Santa Clarita, Simi Valley, Moorpark and Antelope Valley, has rejected an affiliation with HomeAdvisor.

“We had already executed an agreement with Realtor.com, and our MLS board of directors felt that for now, that’s where they choose to stay,” said Jim Link, the group’s executive vice president.

The Combined Los Angeles/Westside listing service is having discussions with HomeAdvisor but has yet to make an agreement. That service also has nonexclusive arrangements with ListingLink and the California Assn. of Realtors.

In the meantime, HomeAdvisor has been filling its listings gaps through deals with real estate brokers and franchise offices.

In this initial launch phase, real estate experts are not of one mind about HomeAdvisor or about any of the real estate Web sites.

Some, like Bill Koelzer, a San Clemente-based real estate Web marketing consultant who is writing a book on the subject for publisher Prentice Hall, said HomeAdvisor is “an extraordinary achievement.”

“As far as their content goes, it’s amazing. It’s so much more useful than Realtor.com and others that it’s not even on the same planet. You can do comparables and line items feature by feature.”

Others, however, are still in a wait-and-see mode.

“I’ve spent some time on the HomeAdvisor site,” said syndicated columnist Ilyce Glink, author of “10 Steps to Home Ownership.” Her columns run on Homeowners.com and Quicken.com as well as in 20 newspapers, including The Times, and many of their sites.

“I think it has good potential,” she said, “though it’s obvious that some of the bugs are being worked out.

“A problem for the Microsoft site that appears to also be a problem for other sites is this policy of excluding [properties] for sale by owners. I think it’s shortsighted in the long run.”

But neither Microsoft nor the other Realtor-friendly sites want to do anything that will upset their main sources of information.

Joel Singer, executive vice president of the California Assn. of Realtors, is taking the long view.

“Microsoft always does an outstanding job with the software,” he said. “Time will tell how effective this site is.

“Although Microsoft has created a Realtor-friendly site, we’re very interested in a site in which Realtors are making the decisions.”

Though Singer and other real estate professionals are advocates of realty Web sites, the consensus is that no matter how much home-buying information the sites provide or how comprehensive the listings, consumers should not assume that the sites can take the place of a knowledgeable agent.

“What I’m hearing from agents is that it allows consumers to come into the marketplace somewhat better educated than before,” Singer said.

“It gives them a better quality of information. Having said that, I think there is a danger that people think they know too much.”

To underline his point, Singer told a story about a buyer in Los Angeles who found a property on the Web that had everything he wanted--the number of bedrooms and bathrooms, the look, the neighborhood--priced well below everything else he found.

“He contacted the listing Realtor, who took him around the neighborhood and showed him comparable houses,” Singer said. “Finally, they drove to the house in question, and, in fact, it did have everything. But lo and behold, it sat right at the foot of one of the runways at Santa Monica Airport. The Web site didn’t mention that.”

Added Glink:

“What I think Web sites do best is give you a general overview of how the process works. The danger is that some folks will then think, ‘That’s it. I now know it all.’ In truth, they’re just beginning to tap into a very complex process that has a lot of potholes in it.”

And that, in fact, is what Kerry Gelbard of Re/Max Centre in the San Fernando Valley worries about.

“It confuses issues and makes consumers think they know more than they do,” he said. “You’re not going to look up a house and call up a Realtor and say, ‘I want to see the house.’ They’re going to look up several houses and call their own Realtor and ask them to look them up. They’re using it as a tool to see what their own Realtor is missing.”

Paul Gould, a Realtor with Baldwin Real Estate Services in Arcadia, has been finding that to be all too true.

“I had a call last Saturday on one house that this gentleman had found on a Web site,” he said. “When I tried to interest him in others, he told me I couldn’t find anything he didn’t already know about on the Web so don’t bother calling him back.

“Some people call about a specific property, and we can’t do anything with them. They become Realtors and they know everything. But unless you get in and see a property, you’re not going to know everything.

“I think it’s a good screening tool, but it gives a false sense of knowledge. You have to have an agent who knows where you want to go, what kind of property you need and can direct you to them.”

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And, given the amount of information a client can potentially come to the table with, these sites are changing the relationship between Realtors and clients.

Real estate analyst Sanford Goodkin sees HomeAdvisor and its competitors as being in the early stages of an evolution in online home buying transactions and an incentive for more Realtors to do their homework.

“Anything that speeds along the process should make Realtors say, ‘I’ve got to get more information. If I’m a professional, I want to be alert to my audience. What are they interested in knowing? Can I compete with a computer? Damn right! I’ll make it personal.’ ”

Clients tell San Clemente Realtor Debbie Ferrari that the more information they get, the better they like it.

“So any site that gives them information about a community, the schools, whatever, the better they like it,” said Ferrari, who is with First Team Real Estate.

“And if it’s all on one site like HomeAdvisor, even better, because they don’t have to shift around. This is building confidence in the buyer.”