If you ride around in the car on weekends trying to find open houses while balancing a map on your lap, it might be time to use your mobile phone instead. A display of properties for sale — and even open houses — could be as close as the screen on your wireless device.
Despite the housing market slowdown, many Americans are still house hunting, and they helped send sales of smart phones and wireless devices to nearly 21 million units in North America last year, according to research firm Canalys.
Big companies and startups alike are scrambling to provide what could be described as the ultimate tech novelty for home shoppers and lookey-loos: searching for homes from a phone.
New mobile services allow users to search for homes for sale, see pictures and details about the properties, get driving directions and call or e-mail the real estate agents handling the sales.
Here are a few of the companies delivering real estate listings to mobile devices:
Trulia: The San Francisco company, a self-described listings “search engine,” two weeks ago announced its new downloadable Trulia Mobile, an application for iPhones and other smart phones, including some BlackBerry, Ericsson, Motorola and Samsung models.
Because the devices can pinpoint your location, you can search for open houses and listings nearby without typing in a city or street address.
You can see one picture and a few details about the listing, phone or e-mail the agent, and get driving directions. Listings come from Trulia’s database, which is extensive but not as complete as most local multiple-listing services’ data.
Terabitz: The Palo Alto, Calif., company that builds Web sites and customer management systems for realty brokerages has also developed mobile listings search for some of its clients, including Intero Real Estate Services and Frontdoor.com, the listings…