Cell phones, home listings united by technology

LOVELAND – Real estate data and Internet technology have been united for a long time. There’s nothing new there.

But add a cell phone to the pairing, along with a database of 77 million homes, and you’ve got a toolbox like no other for mining real estate information, even from curbside.

HouseFront LLC, developed partly by Loveland land, water and real estate mogul Craig Harrison, allows legions of new users to key in an address of almost any home and retrieve a suggested purchase price, a sale history, Multiple Listing Service data and comparable sales in the same neighborhood.

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It’s not the only Internet-based data service that provides that kind of information, but -so far – it’s the only one that plugs the data into 95 percent of the 230 million cell phones in use nationwide.

“We call it real estate voyeurism,” Harrison said of the rush to put sale information online and into the hands of cell phone users. “Everybody wants to know how much his neighbor’s house is worth.”

HouseFront’s home on the Web, www.housefront.com, is not much different in that regard to a handful of competitors, including a service called Zillow.com, launched in January, and the even more recent trulia.com.

Traffic counts to the HouseFront site, and records of cell phone text searches, as of May 21 showed that the new venture had made huge strides in the seven weeks since its April 1 launch. A brief mention of HouseFront in a late April edition of U.S. News and World Report surely didn’t hurt.

In less than two months, the service had logged 7,500 cell phone information requests and 66,000 property services on the Web site.

And more and more users are putting the two together.

“We’ve made it possible for people to go to the Web, key in their cell phone numbers, and get a mapped display of all the searches they had made by cell,” Harrison said. In so doing, HouseFront is linked to another Harrison venture, LandVoyage LLC, a company that provides dozens of layers of data in a geographic information software package that dovetails perfectly with HouseFront.

HouseFront’s CEO is Denverite James Eberhard, a Colorado State University dropout that Harrison refers to as “Jimmy the cell phone king.” Eberhard has built, and sold for $40 million, another mobile-phone content business and is also the founder of Mobile Accord Inc. of Denver. Mobile Accord uses cell phones as the network for marketing and promotion messages for political groups, nonprofit organizations, churches and other such entities.

Harrison said he had become so immersed in HouseFront that his other business interests, including land and water brokerage and real estate development, had gotten short shrift.

He recently hired his son, Chuck, and Chuck’s boyhood buddy and former University of Nebraska football star Ross Pilkington, as brokers using the HouseFront system.

“I saw this business, and I liked what I saw,” Pilkington said. “I’m making my career out of this. This area around here is an absolute hot spot. And with all Craig knows and all he’s able to teach, it’s a great position to be in.”

Editor Tom Hacker covers real estate for the Northern Colorado Business Report. He can be reached at (970) 221-5400, ext. 223 or at thacker@ncbr.com