More and more real estate professionals are downloading Multiple Listing Services (MLS) home listings to their PDAs. But recently two leading providers of online real estate information, Homestore.com and Homes.com, have developed a way to access property information wirelessly using a Palm handheld computer, making downloads a thing of the past.

All you need is a Palm VII or other Palm model equipped with a wireless modem and a small application called a Palm Query Application, or PQA for short. Homestore.com and Homes.com provide the PQAs needed to access their sites free of charge and you don't have to register or sign up.

PDARE decided to take a closer look at these two PQA's and here's what we found.

Homestore.com's web site, which acts as a gateway to other familiar real estate destinations including Realtor.com and SpringStreet.com, boasts the largest collection of online listings, some 1.3 million at the time of this writing. With agreements in place with a vast majority of local MLS services, the site provides information on virtually all properties currently for sale nationwide.

	Homestore.co

Homestore.com's PQA offered the choice to search either for homes in the Realtor.com database, for new homes in the HomeBulder.com database, or for apartments through SpringStreet.com. While the last two options may appeal to professionals that specialize in those areas, we focused on searching for a home in the Realtor.com database for our comparison.

Searching for a property is simple with Homestore.com's PQA. You input a city, state, search radius and some property-specific information, and the application quickly returns the results that meet your criteria. It uses a lot of drop-down menus, which is terrific for those of us that haven't yet mastered inputting information into the Palm using the stylus and Graffiti. Only the city really needs to be entered, and for those with no Graffiti skills, using the pop-up keyboard for this small amount of data is only a mild inconvenience.

The results of the property search are presented in order, one property at a time, starting with the lowest priced properties. Information such as price, neighborhood, city, county and zip code is provided in a quick summary followed by a two or three sentence description of the property. And the MLS number is also included along with the listing agent's information if it's available.

	Homes.com

Homes.com's web site claims a slightly less comprehensive database thanRealtor.com with approximately 700,000 listings. However, during our tests using the same city, search radius and price levels, PDARE found that Homes.com consistently returned a higher number of matching results. (Note: In some cases the difference was very large, which may be attributable to different methods for categorizing properties within major metropolitan areas. However, even for searches of smaller centers, the outcome was similar, although far less pronounced.

	Homes.com

Homes.com's PQA also provides a menu of options, with the main difference being its ability to access daily mortgage rates. We gave it a try since good up-to-date mortgage information is always handy. Unfortunately, the amount of data provided is relatively lackluster, only two options were presented for 30-year fixed rate mortgages.

The interface for the home search screen is similar to Homestore's PQA, and equally easy to understand. On the positive side, it provides a few additional search criteria, such as number of bedrooms and number of bathrooms. On the negative site, it doesn't use drop-down menus as much as Homestore's PQA, which means more input using the stylus or pop-up keyboard.

Search results are presented in reverse order with the more expensive properties listed first. Summary information including price, number of bedrooms, number of bathrooms and square footage is presented first, allowing five properties to be listed per screen. Selecting any individual property from this list calls up more comprehensive information such as description, MLS number and listing agent.

For the real estate professional on the move, the benefits of being able to track down property information wirelessly are obvious. Being able to research listings without having to call or return to the office is a tremendous timesaver in a business where time means money. Combining the wireless capability of the Palm VII or other modem equipped Palm with either of these PQAs provides a excellent tool for remote access to real estate information.

Somewhat tangential but also beneficial is the impression "cutting-edge" technology portrays to clients. While each homeseeker is unique, many professionals would probably agree that their customers (particularly those with technology backgrounds) appreciate their real estate professional using the latest and best tools to assist them with their home search.

As with any new technology, the first generation of these PQAs leaves a little to be desired in terms of functionality. The most noticeable area for improvement is how results are displayed and navigated. Using the Homestore.com's PQA, the user has no choice but to click through the properties one at a time. For a results set any larger than ten or so, this process would be very inconvenient, bordering on painful. Homes.com's PQA is slightly better in this regard in that it provides a summary screen with five properties per page, so scrolling through longer lists is somewhat more efficient.

	Find a Home

What is needed is a well thought out summary screen that reports the number of properties that meet the defined criteria. This should include a list of those properties with the price, number of bedrooms, number of bathrooms and square footage (similar to Homes.com) with at least 20 results per page. It should also include the ability to jump forward in the results set without going a page at a time. Then if you were looking at properties 1-20 and you knew you wanted to see 81-100, you could jump to that screen without going through four irrelevant pages. These simple enhancements would make searching for and reviewing properties on a PDA significantly more efficient.

Another significant change that would do wonders for these tools is to add more specific information regarding the property. The address is most notably absent in this regard, since there is limited benefit to knowing that there is a property that fits a client's needs in Portland but not knowing where it is. If it's necessary to call the office or the listing agent to get this bit of data, then the technology really hasn't reached its full potential.

	Realtor.com

Two other features that would be welcomed by real estate professionals would be the ability to look up a property by the address and more detailed search criteria.

In the first case, consider how useful it would be if, while driving by a new listed property, it were possible to quickly access all of the specifics and determine whether it matched a current client's profile.

As for the second, being able to specify price, number of bedrooms and number of bathrooms is nice, but to be really effective more options need to be added to give professionals the flexibility to refine their searches. No need wasting time paging through properties that could otherwise have been eliminated for one reason or another.

Homestore.com and Homes.com have provided excellent first efforts in the wireless application area. Real estate professionals can skip the long wait for MLS home listings to download to their Palm handhelds. But there's still a ways to go before either becomes a truly useful tool for every real estate professional.

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