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Real estate geeks out: How mobile apps, social media and GPS have changed house shopping forever (© William Andrew/Getty Images)
© William Andrew/Getty Images

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."
Homebuyers are also reading online reviews. "Everything's about the review right now," Hahn says. For instance, home seekers are checking out reviews of real-estate agents on their Yelp app before making that first phone call to an agent. Zillow in December launched a review function on its site that allows visitors to rate and review ratings of agents; it now has about 45,000 reviews posted.
That's not the only way they're soliciting opinions, Hahn says. "Buyers and sellers are all over social media, too, so when they're looking for a home, they're posting a picture of it on Facebook and saying, 'Hey, friends, what do you think of this?'"
Sellers switch strategies, too
While apps for homebuyers have grabbed most of the attention, a lot is happening on the selling side, too.
In years past, people scoured the classified ads and the weekend sections of their local paper to find out about homes for sale. Not anymore. "I stopped spending money on a lot of paper advertising and almost all of it in some sort of Web-based or mobile-based technology," says Chip Plumley, 32, an agent with Prudential Fox & Roach in Kennett Square, Pa. "I'm in that Generation X and Generation Y where they really don't pick up a newspaper anymore because you can get it all on your phone or your iPad."
5 other real-estate tech trends
1. Single-property websites: So where are people looking? One place is on websites — but not the websites of even three years ago, agents say. Those sites were crowded with many properties. "Over the last few years one of the big changes is a lot of single-property websites," Hahn says — that is, a website dedicated to an individual home that's for sale. These sites not only have high-quality photos and detailed information about the home, but often have all sorts of other useful links: to the home's Walk Score, to a mortgage calculator, to a mortgage broker and, of course, to contact info for the real-estate agent. "We know buyers want to be more involved than ever before, so we're trying to give them that," Hahn says.
Barry Peters, 56, employed many of these tricks when selling his home in Doylestown, Pa. Peters, an executive for a business process outsourcer who confesses, "I've certainly geeked out on both the buy and sell end," set up a website with high-quality photographs, a link to the multiple listing service listing and a "Friends Say" blog where people could leave impressions about his home. He also set up a Foursquare site for his house, named it "Chez Peters For Sale" and attached a Twitter account that would tweet to agents and others when showings or an open house were held. The Twitter feed also ran on his home's website.
"I honestly have no idea" which of these strategies worked to sell the house, he concedes. But sell it did. "I would do it over again, absolutely," he says. "For the amount of time that it took … we got thousands of looks on the website."
2. Getting the seller involved: The house isn't the only thing to get its own website these days. "Once someone has listed with us, they get their own personal website" with a checklist of all the things that the real-estate agent has to do, and whether each has been done — everything from having the home measured to having professional photos taken, says Jill Giese, an agent with Jill Giese and Associates at Keller Williams Realty Boise in Idaho. The website lets sellers keep tabs on the entire process, she says. "So they see what we've committed to do for them, and they can see whether we've done it. So it helps hold us accountable," Giese says.
Real estate geeks out: How mobile apps, social media and GPS have changed house shopping forever (© © John Rotett/Raleigh News & Observer/Getty Images)
© John Rotett/Raleigh News & Observer/Getty Images

3. A bar code for the new millennium: Brochures were once a mainstay of house hunting. The importance of all that paper waned with the rise of the Web and now with apps. But QR (short for quick response) codes are changing that again.
A QR code is basically just a quirky-looking bar code that's easily made and can be put anywhere — on the back of a business card, on a yard sign, on the bottom of a brochure. When the code is scanned by a mobile device that has downloaded a QR code reader, the person is taken directly to a Facebook business page, a Twitter profile, a website for a house or a testimonial video on YouTube — the options are wide open. It's an easy way to get people connected to information.
QR codes "are really what's making our print relevant again," Hahn says.
4. Video is huge: "Our video use over the last two years, I would say, has just gone through the roof," Hahn says. "People want to watch … they don't want to read." As a result, "We're shooting listing tours — basically an agent walking around the home, and then sellers telling what they love about the neighborhood and about the house." The videos are uploaded to YouTube and are linked to the home's website or a QR code on a brochure.
"It's all about reaching your consumers the way they want to be reached, so that's what we try to do."
5. The talking door: Another cool e-vention: Electronic lockboxes on homes for sale. They can be opened electronically using a visiting agent's phone, and whenever someone enters the home with that key, an email goes to the seller, telling her which agent came to the house. An email also gets sent to that visiting agent, thanking her and asking for feedback.
Changing the agent's life
These technological advances are changing the way real-estate agents get clients, too. Take Plumley: He's on Foursquare, which is connected to his Twitter and Facebook accounts, which are in turn connected to LinkedIn, the business networking site.
"Just last night I posted on Twitter and Facebook that I was being interviewed by MSN today. And later last night I got a Facebook message" from someone saying his parents were relocating from Tennessee and asking if he could help. "That was one little post that took, what, five seconds to do? And it increased my chances of making a sale, because someone thought of me," he says.
"The biggest thing is to keep your name out there."
But maybe one of the biggest changes of the past few years, one that affects buyers, sellers and agents alike, is the rise of the paperless office and how it has streamlined the whole process of buying and selling a home.
"The way that it used to be (when looking for a house) is that you had to sit down with a mortgage broker, get preapproved, go out to look at houses. When you found a house you liked, you went back to the office, filled out a ton of paperwork — the carbon-copy paper — then I had to drive the offer to the other agent's office. If the other agent wasn't there, he'd have to drive and pick it up," Plumley says. And so on.
Now, he says, "Everything has gotten a lot simpler." Prospective homebuyers can get preapproved on the Internet. With the rise of videos and abundant information on the Web, they can sift through many home options without ever getting in the car.
And so much of agents' information is now available on their mobile devices that a homebuyer or seller never needs to step into a real-estate office. "We can meet wherever it's convenient for the customer," Giese says. (She calls her local coffee shop "the coffice.")
"It's absolutely changed the way we work," Hahn says.
Once someone decides on a house, Plumley says, documents can be signed and passed back and forth electronically without anyone ever being in the same room. "There was one time where I never met the seller in person," he says.
But the biggest benefit is the savings in time and hassle. For a homebuyer, "Instead of looking at 20, 25 homes (in person), they're probably looking at five to seven — worst case, they're probably looking at 10," he says. That's perhaps 30 or 40 hours of hassle saved right there, he says, "not to mention gas money."
The end of real-estate agents – or a rebirth?
What do all these changes mean for agents?
Most seem to be embracing them, says Hahn, who is responsible for educating about 500 agents. They know that Generation Y outnumbers the baby boomers now, and "they have to deal with us," says Hahn, 34.
Will all this information and power in the hands of buyers and sellers make agents irrelevant? Agents don't seem worried. Homebuyers and sellers still seem to want help with the negotiation process, for instance, agents say.
And there are other factors.
"Our job is 75% counselor, 25% Realtor," Giese says. "Technology is not going to change the fact that it's a human business, it's a person-to-person business. It's not a transaction, and it's not about a house to most people. It's about a life."
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