Follow property listings? Now they follow you.
By Elizabeth Razzi Saturday, January 16, 2010 
Meet the latest entrant to smartphone house-hunting: Realtor.com. The official Web site of the National Association of Realtors just unveiled a free app for the iPhone.
The demo, shown to during a teleconference, revealed a couple of cool features, not least of which is access to about 4 million listings that are supposed to be updated every 15 minutes.
Like Zillow's iPhone app, which was launched in April, the new app uses the phone's GPS function to zero in on your and display nearby listings.
The Realtors said the app will allow shoppers to search for open houses within a 20-mile radius, sorted by location or date. Users can take camera-phone pictures of listings as they tour them, assign them star ratings, jot notes on the phone, and quickly post listings to their Twitter or Facebookpages -- or e-mail them to friends, family and their real estate agents.
The folks at Realtor.com wouldn't get into specifics about whether apps for other kinds of smartphones would be coming soon. But they did say they hope "to launch other mobile initiatives" later in the year.
Last week, the Washington-based online brokerage Sawbuck Realty introduced its own GPS-based mobile Web site, http://m.sawbuck.com. It's designed to operate not as a downloadable application specific to one brand of phone but as a site that can be accessed by any browser-equipped phone.
Source: Washington Post
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