More addicting things to do with your cell phone

PHILADELPHIA -- A handful of real estate reporters had the chance to test drive a mobile real estate toy while walking around Philadelphia today. It was Smarter Agent's GPS mobile real estate application, which enables you to stand on the street and pull up information about nearby homes for sale on your cell phone. The Smarter Agent team equipped me with a Sprint phone (currently the only carrier enabling the app), which I flipped open and scrolled through at various points to see what's on the market. Listings are shown on a map or as a scrollable list and users can get details about square footage, taxes, number of beds and baths, price, listing broker info. It gives you the option to click a button and contact the agent to see the house.

I've been following the development of this application for many years now since the Blumberg brothers got their patent and started working out deals with MLSs and cell phone carriers. The application runs smoothly, with the only holes I could spot being the lack of info from the actual listing in some cases (no photos or just a photo of the outside of the building). And also I had no way of knowing whether it was picking up all the MLS listings around since this isn't my 'hood and I don't know the market.

It kind of adds an Amazon-ish "if you like this, you might like that" layer to looking up real estate. For instance, the row house with the Prudential sign on it was too expensive, but look there's a home with a lower price in the same neighborhood a block over.

Eric Blumberg, president of Smarter Agent, said the most challenging part of building this type of application has been figuring out how to get all the information into a tiny a cell phone screen without driving users bonkers.

The service is expected to hit San Francisco soon.

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