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If you haven't bought or sold a home recently, prepare for a culture shock:
In the past three years, technology — especially the rise of smartphones — has transformed the way people hunt for homes and sell them. House hunters have access to more information and therefore have more power than ever before. Homeowners and real-estate agents, meanwhile, have more cool tools to reach those sellers.
The upshot? We're seeing a shake-up of the real-estate landscape that may be more dramatic than when listings first appeared on the Web about 15 years ago.
The revolution is in your hand
Nothing has changed the homebuying experience in the past few years as much as the rise of the smartphone.
Popular real-estate sites such as Zillow, Realtor.com and Trulia offer applications for smartphones and tablets that allow a user to search for homes based on the user's location. You can stand in a neighborhood you like, conduct a search and see homes for sale pop up all around you on the map.
Amy Bohutinsky, chief marketing officer for Zillow, says smartphones have two features that really impact real estate: graphic screens and GPS. "Both of these are really game-changers for real estate," she says.
House hunters seem to agree: Zillow's app was used about 8.5 million times in April 2011, Bohutinsky says. Users of Realtor.com's app look at about 30 million homes a month on mobile devices, says Steve Berkowitz, chief executive officer of Move Inc., which operates the site.
Part of the appeal are the nifty tricks these programs can do. On Zillow's app, for instance, a house hunter can walk around a neighborhood, see a house with a "For Sale" sign, pull out her smartphone and see how long the home has been on the market and how many times the price has been reduced. The prospective buyer can then look at houses nearby and see that one sold six months ago for $50,000 less, suggesting that maybe the home for sale is still overpriced.
Realtor.com, meanwhile, has what might be called Etch A Sketch for adults: A smartphone user can highlight an area by drawing a shape with his finger, and the app will present any homes for sale in the highlighted area. A person can create the neighborhood he wants to be in.
"Mobile is just such a natural for this business," Berkowitz says. "It really can lead the way."
Today's real-estate customer
Logan Jones has become an expert at tapping this new technology, as the 26-year-old Boeing employee looks for a new home in the St. Louis area.
"First I want to know the areas, so I'm using those websites to know who is in those areas," Jones says. "We're a young family, and so we don't want to be stuck in retirement areas." Websites like Zillow have sections called "local info" that categorize the type of people who live there — such as "young urban singles," "dual income no kids" (aka DINKs) and "empty nesters," he says. He can also get information on median income, and links to websites that rate schools.
Eventually, Jones hits the road to look at houses. "Once we come up to an address of a home we like, we can pull up the history, how much it sold for, when it sold and the details behind it," he says. Jones says there have been several instances where he was able to research the home on the spot and decide it had been sold too frequently or was out of his family's price range. Then he can move on "and not take the time to bother with it," he says.
"All those traditional roles that the Realtor did, I can now do it," he says. Jones says he appreciates the power that these apps have given him. "I trust information that I come up with and find more than information that is just handed to me."
Jones even used an app called HotPads to find a temporary apartment in St. Louis while working and house hunting.
Listening to tweets and reviews
Apps aren't the only technology house hunters are using.
"My company, we actually tweet the listings feed by school district," says Stefanie Hahn, education director for Coldwell Banker Hearthside Realtors in Collegeville, Pa. "We know that most buyers look by school district." If a would-be buyer knows that he wants to live in, say, the Central Bucks School District, then he can sign up for that feed and every morning be notified by Twitter of any new listings in that district. "It's tremendously useful – if you're on Twitter," Hahn says. "I think the audience is limited, but going forward I think it will get bigger."
