A graphic in Sunday's Real Estate section incorrectly listed the number of homes for sale through Dial-A-Tour, an interactive phone service owned by SLM Computer Business Services in Ellicott City. The company said this week there are 300 homes listed.
The Sun regrets the errors.
House hunting may never be the same.
Large real estate companies and a handful of other businesses are introducing new tools to help buyers shop for houses without leaving their homes. Home Net, Dial-A-Tour, Hot Line and Comp-U-Home are but a few of the services available now to consumers in the Baltimore area who want to house-hunt from their living rooms.
Consumers may be surprised to find the detailed array of information, which real estate agents once held tightly to themselves, now available to anyone with a telephone or a computer and modem.
House hunters may pick up their phones or sit down at their home computers, punch in the size, style and neighborhood of house they want to buy, and get an immediate list of houses for sale in their price range. They may specify how many fireplaces they want. Whether they prefer a 15- or 30-year mortgage. How much money they need to qualify for a loan.
And they may do all of this from home, anonymously, before they meet with a real estate agent or a loan officer.
Steve Murray, editor of an industry newsletter called Real Trends, which tracks the real estate trade, has helped companies set up interactive systems, including one for Long & Foster Inc.
"When you go to any kind of store, you prefer to do your own shopping first, prior to having a salesperson attach to you," Mr. Murray said from his office in Denver. "It's the same with buying a home."
He said interactive listing services have been around for four or five years. Fewer than 20 firms in the country had installed them prior to 1993. But suddenly, he said, brokerages and other companies of all sizes want them. Mr. Murray offered three reasons why interactive services now are growing: the cost is coming within reach of leading residential brokerage firms; consumers are more open to using interactive services; and consumers, more and more, want access to listings.
But don't look to the Central Maryland Multiple Listing Service to offer their data base to the public. The CMMLS coordinates all listing information about houses for sale in much of the state, and the real estate community shares MLS listings.
Right now, no one but a MLS-subscribing agent may pull a listing out of the CMMLS system. Warren Tunkel, CMMLS executive vice president, said that won't change.
But nothing prevents agents from giving their own listings to other companies to distribute to consumers. That's how the new listing services get their information.
Mr. Tunkel agreed that new interactive services will save agents some time, since prospective buyers can do much of their preliminary searching on their own.
"But on the other hand, it may be a disservice to the public," Mr. Tunkel said. "The expertise of the Realtor in a transaction and the ability to help a person find what they are looking for goes far beyond what a computer can provide. Listings are just a tool."
James P. O'Conor of O'Conor, Piper & Flynn in Timonium, believes most consumers still want to search for houses by hiring a sales agent at the start.
"At present, buyers are still quite satisfied to get information in the more conventional method," Mr. O'Conor said. "We have no immediate plans for customer access," to the brokerage's listings except through agents.
Other brokerage firms say they are happy to open their listings.
"A lot of people want to look at houses, but they may not want to sit down with an agent," said Donald Grempler of Coldwell Banker Grempler Realty Inc. in Towson.
Mr. Grempler's firm makes its listings available to consumers with personal computers through an on-line computer information service. He doesn't think it makes the company's real estate salespeople obsolete. When house hunters have narrowed their search, they'll call a sales agent to help them make other decisions and initiate a contract, Mr. Grempler said.
Some examples
Here are just a few of the companies that offer listings by phone or computer, free to consumers who want to browse. The services are accessible all day, every day, from anywhere.
* Long & Foster Real Estate Inc. has a new service for consumers that describes its 4,500 listings in the Baltimore area by telephone. Just call a local number from a touch-tone phone, punch a few buttons, follow the audio text and find out what's for sale in your favorite neighborhood. Long & Foster calls its service Hot Line; the system went on-line March 6.
* Coldwell Banker Grempler Realty Inc. offers personal computer users with modems a listing of homes for sale by its agents. Grempler's service is called Comp-U-Home.
Grempler downloads the entire MLS on its computer, then selects Grempler listings to be downloaded by personal computer users on their terminals at home. Mr. Grempler said that the service has close to 2,000 listings in the Baltimore area and has been in operation for about five years.
Not everybody has a computer, modem and the knowledge of how to operate them, of course. Nonetheless, Mr. Grempler said Comp-U-Home gets about 4,000 calls a month.
* Telemedia Marketing Inc. of Columbia offers consumers a multiple listing service by phone called "Home Net." Each property has a voice description, including asking price, location and rundown of features and amenities.
Donald Savage, who started Home Net two years ago, admits his system is very small. "One week we may have 200 to 300 listings. Another week it's down to 50," he said. "We've had a heck of a time trying to get agents to accept this new technology."
Mr. Savage said that some agents also fear they'll lose control of the sales process if they give consumers free access to their listings.
"It does not put a cloud over agents," he said. "Consumers are so smart now and they want this information. Ultimately they'd have to use an agent to consummate the deal.
"You can't control the buyer anyway. He's going to do what he wants."
Steve Campbell Realty in Baltimore is among the real estate companies that bought listings on Mr. Savage's system, paying a one-time fee of $25 for each listing.
"The price was good and I thought it was an interesting concept," said Steve Campbell. "We got a few calls, but I haven't gotten a wild response."
* SLM Computer Business Services in Ellicott City also offers an interactive phone service with multiple listings from different agents. Husband and wife team Sharon and Jerry Maltagliati developed the system for the Baltimore area and call it "Dial-A-Tour."
Ms. Maltagliati said Dial-A-Tour was introduced in January, after about a year of development. She is still working to sign up brokers, agents and owners selling their own properties. Coldwell Banker Grempler Realty agent Elaine Northrup has agreed to list some of her properties on Dial-A-Tour as a test.
"They offered it to me for free," Ms. Northrup said. "It's so new, we haven't had the chance to really use it. The jury is still out," on how well it will work. But she does like the price. Dial-A-Tour charges about $10 per month per property listing.
* Computer on-line information services allow personal computer users to tap into a vast network of electronic bulletin boards. Most of the on-line services -- CompuServe Information Service, GEnie Information Services, Prodigy Services Co., and America Online Inc., to name a few -- have real estate bulletin boards where users can post properties for sale. Many real estate agents also use the bulletin boards.
The number of listings is not comprehensive, though. On a recent scroll through CompuServe's Residential Real Estate classified ads, only seven Maryland properties were posted.
* Just as it advertises listings in the newspaper, The Sun may eventually list properties for sale in Sundial, its interactive telephone information service. Right now, house hunters can get up-to-date mortgage rate information from Sundial. Soon, callers also may be able to browse through listings or get property descriptions on specific houses for sale by following prompts in the audio text.
* Dial-A-Home is a phone listing service developed by Patrick Raymond.
An O'Conor, Piper & Flynn agent in Howard County, Mr. Raymond said he introduced voice property classifieds about three years ago because he couldn't reach enough house hunters with traditional advertising. He used expertise from a previous career in the computer field to create software for the phone system, then recorded his own listings in it. Now he accepts listings from other agents, charging them $5 for each property box.
Mr. Raymond continues to work as an O'Conor, Piper & Flynn agent while he markets and maintains Dial-A-Home. Other agents from the real estate firm have bought property boxes from him.
"My broker thinks it's the greatest thing in the world," Mr. Raymond said. "We had an agent who lost a listing to someone else who had something like this. He came to me and said, 'How can I get a listing on here.' "
Mr. Raymond estimates he has about 100 listings now, all O'Conor, Piper & Flynn properties. But he said the service is open to anyone selling real estate; owners themselves and people from other agencies.
Mr. Tunkel isn't bothered by upstarts like Home Net, Dial-A-Tour and the others. He says the Central Maryland Multiple Listing Service has no real competition.
That's not to say CMMLS doesn't feel pressure to update the way it delivers its listings to subscribing agencies. Mr. Tunkel said CMMLS is revamping its system to make it easier for real estate agents to use its listings on their own computers.
CMMLS calls its new system Crab-Net, for Comprehensive Real Estate And Business Network. By the end of the year, Crab-Net will offer agents a digitized floor plan or photo with each listing.
But Mr. Tunkel said opening the listing service directly to consumer use is "probably a long way from happening, if ever. The information is proprietary to the association and individual companies."
"Realtors own us," Mr. Tunkel said. "We are not a marketing company selling our services. We'll implement [change] when they are ready for it, as opposed to trying to sell them what they don't need."
Mr. Murray, editor of Real Trends, disagrees with the CMMLS. "If Realtor boards think they can enforce that kind of discipline on the marketplace, they'll . . . succeed in depriving consumers of a service they want," he said.
"Consumer access to MLS, provided much more easily and in more detail, is only a matter of time, regardless of what Realtors want or what they say they will permit to happen."