House Hunting by Computer

One out of every six U.S. families will be looking for a new house this year. And no matter how many times they have brought it off successfully in the past, each new move becomes an ordeal. All this is likely to change radically and in the very near future. The real estate world is beginning to shift over to computers, and with dramatic results.

Leader in the field is Detroit's eight-month-old Realtron, Inc., which uses an IBM 1440 to keep an up-to-date account of 8,000 listings in the area, with each house coded for 23 characteristics, including location, style, extra baths, price, and, on request, even the cost of adjacent property. Thus, when Mr. and Mrs. John Grima recently decided that what with their Great Dane, they had too much house and too little yard in their suburban residence in Westland, they consulted a broker subscribing to Realtron. Their specific requirements were checked off and fed into the computer; within five seconds, Realtron came back over the broker's Touch-Tone telephone with a list of houses answering their description (where none are available, the computer moves on to list those "nearest" to what they have specified). In the Grimas' case, the requests were so special that it took two weeks for the computer to find their dream solution. In the process, they never left home. The computer did all the work except make the final decision and draw up the purchase agreement.

Closing the Deal. So effective has Realtron been that it has been adopted by the real estate board of Fairfax and Arlington counties in Virginia to list some 1,800 houses in that area. What a timesaver it can be was demonstrated by U.S. Army Major Ronald Dubois, a Viet Nam veteran, who was assigned to the Pentagon. After following up several leads only to have his hopes dashed, he consulted Falls Church, Va., Broker Reba Gardner. She put their problem to Realtron.

They wanted a four-bedroom house with a family room, near the Pentagon, a good school, church and bus line to Washington, D.C. The computer had the answer. When Reba Gardner called the broker selling it, he exclaimed, "My God, Reba. I just got that house a few minutes ago." An appointment was made for Major Dubois to see the house first thing the next morning. By 11 o'clock the deal was closed.

National Network. Such speed is as popular with real estate men as it is with house hunters. A few weeks ago, a $15,500 ranch-style home became available in the Detroit area on a Saturday morning. Even though it was not officially listed, indexed, and publicized, eleven people learned of it through Realtron and came to visit it. By that afternoon, the house was sold to one of them. Says E. Gordon Sinclair, president of Evergreen Realty: "Normally, we wouldn't have had that house on the market for five days."

Kalamazoo, Mich., came on the computer line last week, by mid-June Nashville and Omaha will follow suit, with Norfolk and Seattle due to join the system by July 1. By then Realtron hopes to have its intercity circuits working effectively. First two areas to start exchanging data will be northern Virginia and Detroit. Pictures of the homes will be converted into small film clips and flashed on a screen, thus bringing closer the day when families can pick their houses across the U.S. on a national computer network as easily as if they were house hunting down the street.

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