Publication Date: May 23, 1997

'Virtual Realty': Finding a Home From Your Desktop

By Sue Mellen

If you've ever been in the market for a house, you know what a chore it can be to find the right home in the right community. Today, tackling your real-world address problem is a little easier, thanks to the proliferation of real estate industry-sponsored sites on the Internet.

The most visible of the sites -- featured in a spate of television ads over the last few months -- is Coldwell Banker Online. The country's second-largest real estate company, Coldwell Banker is putting a lot of eggs in its Internet basket, with 146,000 of its listings now accessible through the site. That's 87 percent of its properties across the country, with the company working toward getting 100 percent of its homes and commercial properties online. It is hoping to add international listings in the future.

When Coldwell Banker took up Web residence in late 1995, it was the first national real estate company to feature properties online. Since then, the site has gained recognition for its quality. In April 1996, International Marketing News, an Internet marketing publication, named Coldwell Banker Online the best Web site sponsored by a national real estate company.

According to Regina Taylor, Coldwell Banker's vice president for marketing, the site racks up two million hits and 80,000 user sessions per week. That translates to between 700 and 1,000 solid leads per week for Coldwell Banker brokers.

"This was a very logical move for us. The Internet is really the perfect medium for real estate. Our primary goal is to sell homes and, compared to traditional media like newspaper advertising, the Internet gives us incredible exposure," Taylor says.

The Web allows Coldwell Banker to publish large amounts of data about individual properties, including photographs, Taylor says. The company's site also offers financing tips, a mortgage calculator, and a database of more than 1,000 frequently asked questions about buying and selling. Under construction is a page that will feature school and community information for various locales. Taylor says the site provides a mechanism for "educating the consumer about every part of the buying and selling process."

Of course it is the interactive nature of the Internet that has endeared the medium to Coldwell Banker’s 2,600 agencies and 59,000 sales associates, who now have a new source of highly qualified prospects. When users submit online forms requesting information, they are self-selecting their way into an elite group of prospects. Sales and marketing executives in every industry are finding this to be an effective means of reaching markets they may have overlooked with traditional media campaigns.

"I think our brokers profile the rest of the population; some of them are using the technology extensively, while others are still finding the best way to use it in their businesses. But they're all excited about the connection to new business. Why wouldn't they be?" Taylor observes.

Since February 1997, the Coldwell Banker site has been operated and managed by Interealty Corp. of Vienna, Va., the country's largest provider of technology and information solutions to the real estate industry. The company counts as clients 400,000 real estate professionals across the United States, Canada and parts of Europe.

Among other services, Interealty offers clients specialized software, including a product called Altaira, a desktop application for accessing and maintaining a database of Multiple Listing Service (MLS) properties. Until recently, the company operated as a traditional Point of Presence network, with individual servers sited at various places around the country. But a recent partnering with AT&T signals a sea change in the way the company provides networking services. The company is now linked into AT&T's nationwide telecommunications backbone, with the Coldwell Banker site a sign of what is to come for MLS users across the country.

"The Coldwell Banker site was a new client, so we brought them right into the system. But we’re starting cut-overs with other offices and systems as well," says Jim Beczkiewicz, Interealty's director of broker business solutions.

To handle the heavy traffic on Coldwell Banker Online, Interealty maintains a mirrored system, with a facility at home-base in Virginia, and another in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Three Hewlett-Packard Pentium Pros running Windows NT—a Web server, a database server and a mail server—operate at each facility. A relational database managed with Microsoft SQL Server works across the system, with changes in the database occurring almost simultaneously in the Florida and Virginia servers. AT&T provides load balancing for the system, determining when traffic should be routed to one location or another in order to prevent bottlenecks.

"This is a reflection of a business direction for us. It's certainly the direction we'll be going from this point on," Beczkiewicz says.

According to Coldwell Banker's Taylor, extensive use of the Web is proving to be the right direction for her company. "Our motto is ‘Making Real Estate Real Easy,’ and the Internet fits right in with that," she says.

Sue Mellen writes from Tyngsboro, Mass.

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