Smarter Agent announced today that its real estate applications for mobile phones are now available for all carriers, devices and platforms, as the result of a new partnership with Verizon Wireless and the rollout of an application for the Android platform.
The company, which also offers applications for Sprint, AT&T and T-Mobile phones, claims it’s the first to offer downloadable real estate applications on all major carriers for all U.S. cell phones.
There are a growing number of real estate applications for Internet-capable smartphones such as Apple’s iPhone, BlackBerry’s Storm and Google’s Android operating system.
But "mobile is extremely fragmented — it’s nothing like the Web, where you build a site for a couple of browsers and it works everywhere," said Eric Blumberg, co-founder and president of Camden, N.J.-based Smarter Agent.
Smarter Agent creates applications designed for specific mobile phones, operating systems and carriers — including traditional "feature phones" that still constitute 74 percent of the cell phone market, Blumberg said.
Smarter Agent’s Homes for Sale application can be branded for real estate professionals and distributed by them. A real estate agent sends a text code to a client’s phone, which allows them to download the branded application directly from the cell phone carrier.
When clients use the application to search for homes, calls to schedule an appointment go to the agent that provided them with the application.
The application can detect the location of users with GPS-enabled phones to find nearby listings, or users can search by address, community name, city or ZIP code to retrieve information including listing price, photos, number of bedrooms and baths, square footage, estimated mortgage payment and taxes.
Blumberg said that in October, users averaged 12 sessions per month, viewing 40 to 50 properties per session.
About half used their phone’s GPS capabilities to search for properties, meaning the other half were "sitting at home or in a restaurant, doing an address search using their mobile device as an access point" to listings, Blumberg said. "It’s not just that mobile is here — mobile is everywhere."
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