Computerized Gadget Puts Home Listings at Fingertips
Saying that timing is the most crucial aspect of making a sale, Antelope Valley real estate broker Bruce B. Hailstone has found that he’s increasingly turning to his hand-held computer to close the deal.
Hailstone uses a service, offered by Los Angeles-based CreSenda Wireless, that was test-marketed by 45 brokers in the San Fernando Valley over two months last summer. It targets the real estate market by giving brokers and agents access to local and national listings via their “personal digital assistants.”
“Our application gives Realtors multiple listing services and allows them to e-mail while they’re in the field,” said Jeffrey Peldon, CreSenda marketing director.
CreSenda is one of several companies now devising wireless solutions for the real estate arena, said Sue Watkins, vice president of marketing for Realty Plus Online, a national online real estate listings service.
“If an agent is able to access their listings out in the field, it makes them that much more customer friendly,” she said.
Her company is one of several looking to adapt online listing services with the technological link to make them compatible with hand-held computer devices. Peldon, who worked in real estate for 25 years before taking a job at CreSenda, said he always was aware of a glaring problem in the way real estate agents had to work.
In order to access listings or pull up information on houses while out with clients, an agent had to go back to the office. “Buying real estate is an impulse buy,” he said, “and if you haven’t satisfied your clients’ needs, they can go somewhere else.”
While CreSenda is designed to build wireless technology for myriad industries, from health care to mortgage banking, real estate was the first one it targeted.
Hailstone, outgoing president of the Greater Antelope Valley Assn. of Realtors, signed up for the CreSenda service six months ago, after seeing a test version at a gathering of the California Assn. of Realtors.
The ability to log on and get the needed information while out with clients has become crucial, he said.
“There was one instance where I thought a client was going to make an offer on one of my listings,” he said. “But while we were at the house, they decided they wanted to see some of the other products I’d shown them on a list.”
Hailstone said he had not made appointments for these other houses to be shown and, at one house in particular, there was no lockbox, allowing real estate agents access with a key. So he punched up that listing on his hand-held computer, found the phone number of the owner and called her.
“She was just getting ready to leave but she said she’d wait for us,” he said. “They ended up buying that house on the spot. And I had never intended to show it to them.”
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What was most important in that situation was the timing--catching the owner before she left--that helped seal the deal, he said.
“When you’re out with clients and they see a house for sale that they might like, I can simply input the address and get all the basic information--list price, number of bedrooms and bathrooms, square footage, lot size--and the seller’s phone number,” he said. “Then I just dial them up on my cell phone and say we’re out front with potential buyers. More times than not, they invite us right in.”
CreSenda’s founders, a group of people with backgrounds in wireless and Internet applications, decided to initially target the real estate market because so many buyers are now first scouting homes on the Internet before they go out in the field, said Garfield Smith, vice president of marketing.
“Forty percent of buyers go to the Web to search out a home prior to going to an agent,” Smith said. “The exclusive nature the agent had on listings has eroded. Buyers are becoming more informed on their own. So it’s become increasingly important for Realtors to have a level of service and speed of communications available for their clients.”
CreSenda, a privately held company that has been financed through venture capital funding from Point West Capital, Triumph Holdings and others, offers the service on the same kind of plan as many cell phone service agreements.
With a $299 down payment, the agent receives a personal digital assistant. Then for $59.95 a month, based on an 18-month agreement plan, he or she can use it for field access to e-mail and listings, via a snap-on wireless modem.
The house listing services are not provided by CreSenda, instead accessed through the broker’s listing account.
The company, which has fewer than 50 employees, is now looking to get out of the hardware end of the market, opting to let people bring in their own hand-held devices to be hooked up to the service.
“In the past month, we’ve been working toward transitioning to just being a service provider,” Smith said. “We’ll still maintain the accounts we have, but in looking toward the future we didn’t want to do all things . . . provision hardware, handle customer services, develop applications. We felt it was best to prioritize and just be an applications provider.”
CreSenda will soon be targeting other segments of the real estate market, including commercial real estate, property management, leasing agents, investment sales agents, trust fund managers and title companies.
“Individuals are working more and more outside of the office,” Peldon said. “And it’s becoming increasingly critical that they are able to get information on a real-time basis.”
