Giving life to real estate apps
By Natalie Hope McDonald
When brothers Eric and Brad Blumberg first introduced their Smarter Agent mobile phone “app” last year, they wanted to revolutionize the real estate industry.
They wanted to use cell phones to do it.
“As customers started flying to the web, all of a sudden realtors had to play catch up,” Eric Blumberg said. “We realized we had a chance to capture mobile users.”
So the Blumbergs, who have been in the real estate business for more than 20 years, started Smarter Agent, a Camden, N.J.-based company that develops applications for the real estate industry for wireless devices.
Their new application, which lets users pinpoint exact locations to find property to buy or rent and in touch with nearby agents, has caught on quickly, aided they say, by the fact that real estate agents have always been so reliant on cell phones going back more than a decade.
“We have about 200,000 new users,” Brad Blumberg said, adding that more than 500,000 agents are currently offering the application, including Prudential, Keller Williams, Century 21 and Coldwell Banker.
Eric Blumberg said he is not just an owner. He is using Smarter Agent to find a home in Philadelphia.
“I walk through Philly all the time,” he said. “This is the greenest technology ever invented.”
He says he no longer prints out 50 pages of listings and MapQuest maps. “Now I find an area we like and we drive to that area,” he says. “I hit the application and it pulls up the closest properties in that neighborhood.”