A Market For Unreal Estate

The Sunday Age

Sunday August 22, 1999

AILEEN KEENAN

Tired of spending every weekend hunting down the home of your dreams? Imagine sitting in a sleek black and grey ``cyber" chair at a touch-computer screen that calls up homes in your area of choice and price range.

After 27 years in the real estate industry, Mr Bill Hegarty understands the frustrations of buying and selling a home. He has spent $2million in the past eight years developing a computer program that streamlines the real-estate process for the buyer, seller and agent.

Mr Hegarty says the business solutions program, which has won an Australian Achiever Award, cuts estate agents' office costs by half and makes the process less stressful and faster.

His Real Estate Gallery Richmond office, which opens in two weeks, has four cyber chairs with touch-computer screens. The program was developed by Multilinks systems.

Snapshots of the homes can be expanded with a video walk-through and views of the street.

Users can print out their selections with agents' contact numbers, a brief description plus a photograph. Mr Hegarty says the cyber chairs are at the forefront of technology and he predicts it will lead to virtual-reality inspections in the next five years.

The program also has a mortgage component that allows the user to see a choice of loan options.

Mr Hegarty predicts that within the next three years, real estate agents will source more than half of property mortgages.

He says the software is consumer driven and aims to address all aspects of buying and selling a property.

For example a user can get access to council and water rates, locality maps, recent sales of similar homes and suburb cost-comparisons.

People can also call up a work history on the home, such as planning permits and applications and work done by architects and interior designers.

Mr Hegarty says that because 74 per cent of buyers do not buy homes in the suburb of their first choice, it is important they can access all suburbs and make comparisons.

Although the public can view house sales on the Internet, Mr Hegarty says the gallery's program is extremely fast and that he went out of his way to make it user-friendly.

``The programmers said it would take an agent two hours to learn an aspect of the program and despite knowing it would take four months to refine, I told them to include it in the software."

Mr Hegarty was a founder of Real Estate World in 1980 which became The Professionals a year later.

He says agents' response to the program, which includes a data base called Real Estate Information Network, has been favorable. It now includes properties throughout Australia and New Zealand but Mr Hegarty says as the system expands it can take in other countries.

Agents can choose to be on the open data base or limit their listings. ``For example, a real-estate company may only want their listings to be revealed to their branch offices."

The programs simplify distribution by delivering new properties automatically throughout the system.

As well as going to the Internet, it has links to all the agents' suppliers such as board-signage companies, newspaper advertisers and utilities, so that people browsing the site get all the information they require.

``They can get confirmation of building approval work done five years ago," he says.

Mr Hegarty has developed nine programs costing $1800 for the suite, or they can be bought individually for about $400. Real estate agents and those wanting to use the system pay $30 a week for the Internet connection and software maintenance and support.

``It's a voluntary system and it's based on the idea of people giving rather than taking away.

``It's cooperation instead of competition."