While waiting for my car to be serviced this morning, I noted a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal for the Apple iPhone. I own an Apple iPhone, which I use as a way to check emails, my calendar, and baseball scores (during the season). Oh yes, I actually do use it as a phone too. The ad featured a dozen and a half applications I could download to the phone, ranging from a one-time cost of $9.99 (for a game) to absolutely free for Associate Press news headlines, a voice recording feature and something called Shazam, which will tell you the name of the artist and a song that is playing if you hold the iPhone up to the radio speaker.
When I accessed the iPhone app store to explore these, I found dozens of other applications for download, including Home Finder. Using large real estate related data bases, including one by Google that stores MLS (multiple listing service) information, Home Finder can access millions of homes for sale. Plug in a zip code for the location of the home you are seeking, a price range, some basic data on number of bedrooms and square footage, and in a few seconds, all homes that fit your parameters are listed.
I tested Home Finder with a search of homes within five miles of Pawleys Island, SC, where we own a vacation home. I set the price between $500,000 and $750,000, the bedrooms at 3+ and the square footage at 4,000. Home Finder kicked out a couple dozen listings (including the same house twice, at two different prices, which indicates that records may not be edited quickly). Many did not include a street address but do include a link to the listing agent's web site, where many more details about the house are available.
Such an application would have saved my wife and me many hours of investigation when we first started looking at properties 20 years ago during vacations along the South Carolina coast. Back then, we relied mostly on the listings in those real estate books you find in racks outside restaurants and in driving around the area. We would stop in golf communities whose front entrances looked attractive or whose golf courses had been well reviewed. Sometimes we hit, and sometimes we missed.
I much prefer the modern app-roach.
