A Phone App for Real Estate Fanatics

In New York, where I live, real estate is second only to the weather on the buzz meter. So naturally, I was tickled to see the first mobile app for real estate mavens, Smarter Agent.

At the moment, Smarter Agent is available as a downloadable application from Sprint/Nextel. You pay a monthly service fee. Because it uses Sprint's built-in GPS service, Smarter Agent is what's come to be called "location-based." You'll be able to walk down the street and press a button on your phone. The phone will know where you are and start cluing you in about real estate: what's been sold or is available in the area, price, floor plans, taxes, and more. If you've seen Zillow, it's similar, but the phone-sized version.

See a home with a FOR SALE sign and want to find out the scoop? Know you want to rent an apartment close to your office? Afraid of paying yesterday's prices in today's market? In the business and looking for the inside edge?

At the moment there three different variants of the Smarter Agent service:

Recent Sales: A Java app that gets data from various public records and costs about $5 a month.

Apartment Finder: This will launch at the end of the month for $3 a month. (The company founders say that real estate season kicks in when the Super Bowl ends.)

Homes for Sale: Launches this spring for $10.99 a month.

I had a demo of the recent sales application. The interface looks like a cross between a mapping program and a classified ad. It's easy to navigate and surfaces a lot of information. In my conversation with Eric and Brad Blumberg, the two brothers who founded the service after successful careers in real estate, they told me that the U.S. is a mobile country. "Forty million people move each year," said Eric. Most people shop for 18 months before buying a home, and one-third of all existing apartment renters move every year (that's 12 million apartments). That could be a lot of people who want a Smarter Agent in their pocket.