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Any given day,
surfers can virtually tour more than
200,000 Canadian properties.
RANDY RAY
Special to The Globe and Mail
Friday, September 24, 1999
When Steven and Chris Gentles relocated to
Beaumont, Alta., from Wichita, Kan., in July, they bought a home
within 48 hours of touring their first open house. And before they
moved in, they knew the addresses of the local schools, the name
of the mayor and the time for Mr. Gentles' commute to work.
Not bad, considering that, three months
earlier, they'd never even heard of Beaumont and knew nothing
about what was available in the town of 6,500 located 15
kilometres south of Edmonton, where they purchased a
2,000-square-foot, single-family home.
Like a growing number of home buyers, the
Gentles family was able to find a place to live and make a smooth
transition by doing much of their research on the Internet, a tool
that, in the past 4½ years, has become the rage among Canadians
buying and selling homes and agents who list properties for sale.
From his home computer in Wichita, Mr.
Gentles was able to search the Edmonton area for a community that
suited his family's lifestyle, study house prices and
neighbourhoods, link with an agent and view full-colour
photographs of homes, schools and the town. He learned the mayor's
name by visiting the town's Web site.
"The Internet is a great way to do your
homework and prepare yourself as you get ready to make a home
purchase," says Mr. Gentles, a B.C. native who moved his family
back to Canada after landing a job as an engineer with Spar
Aerospace Ltd. in Edmonton.
In early 1995, when homes were first
advertised on the Internet, buyers could examine a few thousand
listings posted by a handful of real-estate companies. Within six
months, listings swelled to more than 20,000 when the Canadian
Real Estate Association (http://www.mls.ca) launched a pilot
project involving member boards in Calgary, Halifax, Oakville,
Ont., and Barrie, Ont.
These days, 94 of the CREA's 114 boards list
properties on the Net, as do hundreds of brokers, agents and
individuals who use corporate and personal Web pages and E-mail
messages to spread the word about homes they are selling.
On any given day, surfers can examine more
than 200,000 Canadian properties and thousands of others around
the globe, says Peter Simpson, manager of multiple-listing-service
research and development for the association in Ottawa.
No one can say how many people use the Net to
help buy or sell homes, but based on the increase in visitors to
various Canadian real-estate Web sites, it's plenty: The CREA
site, which has more than 90 per cent of all homes listed on the
Multiple Listing Service, was receiving 20,000 visits a day this
summer, nearly four times as many as a year earlier.
By July, 109,000 people a month viewed
listings on a real-estate Web site (http://www.jurock.com)
set up by Ozzie Jurock, president of Jurock International Net in
Vancouver, versus 200 a month in early 1995. And last month, the
Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver Web site (http://www.realtylink.org)
received double the number of visitors of a year earlier.
This surge in electronic researching and
shopping for homes has some agents giving the Internet direct
credit for closing deals on one of every 10 homes they sell. There
are even occasional stories of buyers who have purchased homes
over the Internet without setting foot inside the front door.
The trend's attributable in large measure to
the phenomenal increase in the number of Canadians connected to
the Net, says Barry Sims, chief information officer with the
Toronto Real Estate Board (http://www.realestate.ca/toronto).
In 1998, 4.3 million households were on-line, 24.6 per cent more
than in 1997, according to Statistics Canada.
Another factor is that, with more real-estate
boards and agents being connected, 97 per cent of all listings
held by licensed realtors in Canada can be viewed electronically,
compared with only 5 per cent four years ago, Mr. Simpson says.
Equally responsible are the improved service
and user-friendliness of surfing real-estate Web sites. In the
past four years, graphics have been fine-tuned, tools have been
added and software has been upgraded. At the same time, computer
users have installed faster modems, and Internet-service providers
have greatly increased the speed at which data can be found and
retrieved.
The bottom line is that it's now easier and
faster to buy and sell homes on the Net.
Since the first listing went electronic,
buyers have been able to view photographs and listing information
around the clock, narrow their search to a handful of houses and
reach an agent by E-mail, often from their homes or offices.
Now homes in almost every community in Canada
can be viewed, with better-quality and more plentiful photographs.
Not only can browsers see as many as 20 pictures for each listing,
they can connect to video tours that give a moving, 360-degree
view of a room or a property and enable them to move the camera up
and down and zoom in or out on various features such as kitchen
cupboards and the old oak tree in the back yard.
And it all happens faster than before: Pages
of information that once took a minute or two to appear on a
computer screen often arrive instantaneously, and photographs that
once took up to five minutes to load show up in less than 60
seconds, enabling buyers to do their shopping 20 times as fast,
says Mr. Jurock, past president of the residential section of
Royal LePage Real Estate Services Ltd.
The mortgage calculators initially provided
on most Web pages to help prospective buyers figure out their
monthly mortgage payments also have been upgraded. Mr. Jurock's
calculator, for instance, figures out mortgage payments in 46
currencies. He and other realtors also have added a variety of
other useful house-buying links.
On Mr. Jurock's site, where buyers will find
6,000 properties, a click of a mouse calls up a page that lists 21
tips for selling a house; another click shows a list of 21 issues
to look out for when buying a home outside the city.
The site also links browsers to Canada's
major real-estate associations and provides dozens of feature
stories about various aspects of property buying or selling. Blain
Weidman, the Leduc, Alta.-based RE/MAX Real Estate agent who sold
the Gentles family their home (http://www.topseller.com),
links browsers to a variety of information sources, such as the
Canadian Bankers' Association for mortgage information and Canada
Mortgage and Housing Corp. for tips on everything from home buying
to cockroach control.
Some sites offer mapping systems that
calculate the distance and chart the route between a buyer's
office and potential homes; in the United States, buyers can use
the Internet to determine a neighbourhood's crime rate, a feature
sure to arrive in a real-estate office near you in coming months.
Other sites have been beefed up to link
browsers to a variety of home-related services, such as lawn care,
house insurance and financial institutions. By the end of this
year, the Toronto board will take that a step further by letting
home buyers, in conjunction with their agents, use the Net to sign
up for cable TV, telephone service, newspaper delivery and a host
of other services, says Don Kottick, TREB's vice-president of
technology and business development.
Agents say the convenience provided by
Internet technology has reduced the home-buying process from
months to weeks, a boon for both buyers and agents. The Internet
serves as a 24-hour business card for agents and, once they link
with interested buyers, they're getting the job done more quickly.
Because buyers are involving themselves in the process at an
earlier stage, less time is spent explaining the basics of real
estate and ferrying buyers among houses.
"Agents who in some cases used to show 40 to
60 houses before closing a deal are now showing 10 or 15," says
Mr. Kottick, who estimates that as many as 70 per cent of home
buyers do some of their research on the Internet.
Agents also use specific technologies to save
time for themselves and their clients. Richard Ling, an agent with
Harvey Kallas Real Estate in Toronto (http://www.richardkcling.com),
uses specialized software that alerts him when a new listing of
interest to his clients comes on the market. He completes a
profile of homes he is looking for, including price range,
neighbourhood and number of bedrooms; when a suitable home hits
the market in Toronto, it shows up on his computer screen.
"The real-estate board updates its listings
instantaneously, but by the time you pore over all of the new
ones, which can be as many as 300 a day, the home has often been
snapped up," he says. "With the Internet, as soon as a home is
available, I know about it and I can tell my clients."
It's also helping put more money into agents'
pockets. The B.C. Real Estate Association says 27 per cent of its
members have fattened their commission cheques because of the Net.
Mr. Weidman says he often lines up clients on-line rather than by
referral from other agents. As a result, he's not required to fork
over 25 per cent of his commission to the referring agent, as is
customary in the industry.
"From an economic point of view, the Internet
is do or die for a real-estate agent. . . . It is critical to my
job," says Mr. Ling, who estimates that up to one in every 10
houses he sells is directly linked to the Internet.
For buyers such as the Gentles family, the
Net is just plain convenient. "When you make a move, you have to
check out the schools and find a good neighbourhood and the best
home. By using the Internet, we did it all in about half the time
we had expected," Mr. Gentles says. | 
