Estate agents in cyberspace

Down at my local cyber-cafe - a combination of steel-grey decor, cathode rays and cappuccino - I sat at a terminal between a sharp-suited city gent and a teenage techno-nerd and tried my hand at surfing the Internet. Assuming that the World Wide Web has massive potential as a medium for buying and selling property, I hoped to find pages of houses and developments, flitting across the screen in glorious digital colour. But as a novice, unfamiliar with this bewildering environment, I spent a lot of valuable time (pounds 5 an hour on the cafe bill) floundering around in cyberspace.

"Trawling is a better word than surfing," agreed property marketing consultant Nicholas Shulman. "Surfing suggests skimming the surface at speed. Trawlers fish around at the bottom, and are quite likely to come up with a kitchen sink. The Internet is currently painfully slow and difficult to access."

Without the required navigational skills, you can end up wading through oceans of nerdy rubbish. When I keyed in the word "houses" and clicked on an item from the menu, I got a colour portrait of Holly C Summer from Wilmington, North Carolina - specialist in past life regressions, hypnosis, tarot and dreams. She's a Cyber-psychic and the only kind of houses she deals in are astrological. When I used the word "home" I tapped into the Man's Page O'Soundfiles and was treated to, among other things, the theme song from Scooby Doo. I also spent a lot of time scrolling though tedious lists of real-estate opportunities in places like Alabama or Iowa.

However, I pressed on, and soon learned that if you are familiar with the refined use of search engines (Yahoo! WebCrawler, Netscape, Excite, for example) or come armed with pertinent Web site addresses, it is possible to access hundreds of British businesses and individuals who are already using the Internet as a property marketing tool.

The Nationwide Building Society is on the Net. Among lists of small, wired estate agents I stumbled across Bunn & Co of Pimlico, Goldenburg & Co of Mayfair and Edwin Thompson of Berwick-upon-Tweed. I found a number of interactive on-line agencies from Interlet to PropertyNet and HomeCo - some of which seem to be under the early stages of construction.

County Hall - Galliard Homes' redevelopment of the backside of the former Greater London Council's Thames-side headquarters - has its own Web site. Call up the relevant page (http://www.propertyfinder.co.uk/county hall/) and series of purple portcullises materialise against a pale electronic lilac wash. A logo, a graphic of Big Ben and a 3D model of the development, slowly downloads - brick by brick - to reveal a row of Sold signs floating over the rooftops. Click onto Interiors (other options include Site Plan and Location) and you get a collection of colour images - a four-poster bed, a white marbled bathroom and a Konig Kuche designer kitchen, plus an artist's impression of the health club swimming pool. County Hall's glossy sales brochure has been translated into HTML - HyperText Markup Language - or Web-compatible material. Press print, and the information is downloaded into hard copy.

Returning to the directory (don't ask me which one) I clicked on an entry flagged "House for Sale, Newquay, Cornwall" and up came a colour snap of a bungalow called Byrony, near "the best surfing beaches in Europe". Other shots show vendors Nick and Joy Lennon enjoying themselves on a summer evening - cheerily raising glasses to the world's Web users - and granddaughter, baby Sophia. "Isn't she gorgeous?" says Mr Lennon's text. "Sorry, I couldn't resist putting her in."

This informal approach to selling continues in HyperText, demonstrating that private vendors (unhindered by the Property Misdescription Act) can teach estate agents a thing of two about writing entertaining sales particulars. "The kitchen is well equipped with gold pine units ... the stream tumbles over little waterfalls ... and the bathroom is rather nice" is what the Lennons say about Byrony. Another set of privately generated on-line particulars details a house for sale in Slough, Berkshire ("Victorian brick-built terraced cottage in an excellent location") and helpfully includes floor plans and a list of local shops and businesses. Estate agency web-sites tend to contain batches of properties, and information is brief and concise.

Net trawling property buyers can spend hours travelling from business- like corporate ads to friendly, personalised home pages, and from amateur snaps to slick, professional graphics. But never mind the presentation, does it work?

Since the Lennons put their property on the Net in February, they have received around 650 "site visitors" (the system counts all those users that actually wait for the page to download), but not one, they admit, has left their PC to view the property in Cornwall. The majority of respondents, says Nick Lennon, have come from America and most of those were just waving at them from across the Atlantic. Typically, users from Nowheresville USA sign the Lennons' home-page guest book or send an E-mail message to say they visited Newquay in 1956 or that the house looks "real neat". A South African potential buyer showed interest but then faded into cyberspace.

The Lennons' pounds 64,995 bungalow has been on the market for three years and the couple feel they have nothing to lose by spreading the word through the Internet. As they already pay a pounds 15-a-month subscription to a service provider (Unipalm Pipex and CompuServe are among the best known) the site cost nothing, other than the price of phone calls and the services of the Web editor who constructed the page in HTML.

Charles Philpot, managing director of international estate agent the Property Marketing Company (PMC), is subcontracting his advertising to a specialist Web publisher. PMC went on-line for the first time in April on behalf of County Hall, and the Web-site has produced over 500 responses. Around 50 per cent came from overseas and close to 100 visitors have proved to be "very serious buyers". At least one is likely to buy into the final phase of the development as a result of using the net. PMC have now set up web-sites for four more London developments.

Specialist estate agency Pavilions of Splendour took out a Web-site on the Net last June (http://www.heritage.co.uk/heritage/) The first month, according to director Gwyn Headley, produced only 21 responses. Now his Internet pages are generating up to 3,000 responses a week. More than 70 per cent have come from abroad. According to Gwyn, the successful use of the Net relies on "skilful cyber-marketing". The secret, he says, is in knowing how to get your name in a prominent site in an easy-to-access directory.

In the property field, a number of specialists are helping to create wider audiences for small players by offering places on Internet umbrella databases. Independent Estate Agents on the Internet (IEAI), for example, was set up by Cega Ltd (http:/www.cega.co.uk) and takes the form of an electronic property newspaper, combining a number of agency pages in one interactive location. "Putting up an un-networked site independently is a bit like putting a message in a bottle and throwing it into the sea," says Cega's Canadian-born managing director Christina Ayer, who aims to provide a "one-stop property shop" on the Net. "For buyers it will be like walking down the high street without leaving their homes," she says. But although IEAI has signed up nearly 40 regional estate agents, the geographical net is still limited to East Anglia, Essex and east London.

A similar property search service is provided by HomeCo (http://www.home.co.uk.), which claims to provide links to pounds 200 million worth of property for sale, but like IEAI's the database is still at an early stage of construction. Eventually, says co-founder Ben Horton, users will be able to home in on any town or region and get a choice of dozens of properties for sale in that area. HomeCo's subscribers are currently limited to areas of London, the Midlands, Cambridgeshire and Edinburgh. "We hope to become the Yellow Pages of Internet property links," says Ben, who admits he needs to attract many more subscribers before his hopes are realised. He is offering space to both estate agents and private vendors free of charge in order to establish a market.

HomeCo invites users to specify residence type, number of bedrooms and price range and then sweeps a chosen area for all properties in that category. A search for a detached house with two, three or four bedrooms, under pounds 130,000, in the Reading/Newbury region produced six examples. As databases build, users will be able to narrow the criteria and get a longer list of suitable properties, all suffixed by phone numbers and e-mail addresses. And IEAI and HomeCo are already providing "virtual home tours" - allowing buyers to step inside a property by clicking onto the door or the window of any room.

At the moment, this facility is limited to pages of "hyper-linked" interior photographs, but there is a future in high-resolution, 3D home tours. Fledgling company Archinet - devoted to creating a design-orientated Web forum for architects on the Net - is already using advanced software to enable users to walk through buildings and get a 360 degree view. The facility could just as easily become the show homes of new developments.

Estate agents remain sceptical about the World Wide Web's potential. "There is no substitute for face-to-face selling and the tactile quality of paper," says Nicholas Shulman. Most agree the Internet is slow, unwieldy and offers a limited British audience (around 3.5 million, of which only 500,000 are private users) dominated by recreational techno-nerds. But web-sites are cheap and as, Stuart Goldenburg of Goldenburg & Co points out, "the Net is giving us 24-hour exposure to a global market." Contracts are being exchanged across continents through the Internet, but the British market in cyberspace still has far to go.

"At the moment, we see it as a useful complementary medium for all our existing marketing, but forecasts suggest that 50 per cent of households will be on-line by the turn of the century," says Charles Philpot of PMC. He believes that estate agents who ignore the Web's potential will do so at their peril. "In a few years time, buyers searching for property through Internet databases will be an accepted part of the market. It might revolutionise the whole system of selling." !