Looking for a home? Start with your keyboard

SEATTLE — Years ago, Molly Bolanos looked for a home the old-fashioned way: She spent hours driving around in her real estate agent’s car, hoping for the best and girding for the worst.

One recent morning, though, the process went like this: Bolanos and her fiance were alerted to a new online listing, checked out the pictures on the Internet, then drove over for a real-life look. Within hours, they were preparing an offer.

“It can be 24 hours — as quick as 24 hours that you’re out making the offer — and it’s because of the Internet,” the Seattle resident said.

Add real estate to the list of industries being forever changed by the Internet.

Home listings — once printed out in books available only to real estate agents — are obtainable to everyone online, accompanied by increasingly sophisticated photographs and virtual tours. Now, a growing number of online services are also cropping up to help people do things like judge house prices, survey neighborhoods and evaluate school districts, long before they ever snap the seat belt in their agents’ cars.

With the nation’s housing boom expected to cool in some areas, experts say such offerings will only increase. And ultimately, the fact that consumers have more power than ever to do alone what real estate agents traditionally helped with could even help further drive down agents’ commissions. Many also expect online tools for househunters to only become more creative and sophisticated.

“The full impact of the Internet has not been realized, primarily because business has been going up each year,” said Steve Murray, editor of the trade magazine Real Trends in Littleton, Colo.

Already, the industry is dramatically different than it was a decade ago. Besides viewing listings online, Bolanos now regularly visits Zillow.com, a new Web site that provides quick, anonymous estimates of home values based on county records and other data. Although the site, which is in test form, isn’t always completely accurate, Bolanos said it gives her a good barometer for judging a home’s worth.

Other sites, such as HomePages.com, use interactive maps and other tools to provide information about neighborhoods, schools, local parks and even nightclubs surrounding a particular home.

Ian Morris, chief executive of HouseValues Inc., which runs the HomePages site, said his business aims to reduce the time people spend househunting. But the company — which makes its money in part from real estate agents — stresses that he still thinks buying a home is complicated and valuable enough to require a Realtor’s assistance.

“This is a professionally assisted transaction,” Morris said. “One hundred years from now, I expect this will be a professionally assisted transaction.”

Still, to survive in a world where consumers have more power via the Internet, many in the industry say agents are being forced to adapt new skills.

David Morrell, an agent in Santa Cruz, Calif., said he now has every house he lists professionally photographed for the Internet postings. When he sees an online listing that’s been up for several days without pictures, he said, “It’s unbelievable to me.”

Real estate agents also may find the value of their service dropping, as people begin doing more legwork on their own over the Internet.

Murray’s data shows that the average commission paid to real estate agents dropped from 6.1 percent of a home’s price in 1991 to 5.1 percent in 2003, the most recent data available. That was mainly driven by the sharp increase in the number of agents vying for business during the booming market, he said. But in a cooler market, he expects the Internet to be among the factors that will drive those commissions down further.

Murray also expects agents to start spending more money on fancy Web sites and other online promotions, perhaps at the expense of traditional marketing such as newspaper advertising.