well it would cost alot of money to make that thing, and in return it will cost very little for the service, so naa dont think it will do any good
and such things can be negotiated so i dont think its gona be a good thought

Actually the cost of building is quite low.

Using a service like textanywhere.net, you get all the SMS infrastructure and the ability to hook in SOAP/webservices. You can then build on that with your own web services, renting a low cost server to host - they start at US$20 or so per month. A Rails or equivalent web-app could be created quite quickly to give a web UI to customers - I'd estimate 6-8 weeks for two or three developers for most of the work, plus some equivalent amount of graphical work for the UI.

You make the money in volume. Hundreds of thousands of houses are sold every year in the UK alone. Dozens of people are interested in every house. Even if you only charged GBP1 per SMS, you'd make about 75 pence per house.

Assuming you can get 100,000 homes (that's less than 1 request per home per year just in the UK) you'd make GBP75,000. Marketing it across many countries expands that market considerably.

Especially if you consider that you then have a record of every phone number that was interested in a particular house, which could be used for follow-up sales calls (many estate agents would be interested in that).

Having been on the house hunting trail myself and being an info-junkie, I'ev often wanted to see weblinks that will let me download the particulars for a given house.

Since estate agents are not too happy about giving them out without the chance to talk to you, I reckon this is a happy medium that both side of the deal could go for.

While a 160 char SMS is a little short for anything but the price, the current sale status, etc, I reckon a weblink to particulars online would be an essential part of the "info pack".

And you're right ; once you have the infrastructure up, even some of the more reasonable rate texts only need a few hundred hits a say to break even on server costs.

Oh, and thanks for a positive comment on my idea :-)

whilst its becoming more and more common for the ForSale signs to cover quite alotr of what youve mentioned (bathrooms bedrooms etc), at least out here in aus, certainly price (and details for rental accomodation is usually sparse) is rarely given, fireing off a quick text to see if a house you like the look of is within your price range is a great idea on its own

This idea is out there since a while
check http://www.zillow.co...abs/ZillowMobile.htm.

To Lu:
The link refers to a different kind of service; it connects an email sent to a home valuation service. It relies on a DB of every house (not viable to multiple markets), it doesn't use SMS (no charging available) and it doesn't give contact information or real price. This service has nothing to do with Aidan's idea.

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Many real state weekly magazines allow free ad posting. Interested people search the magazine or website and when they find something they like, they have to send a SMS (with a cost involved) to get the owner's phone number and contact information.

But what happens when they are in front of the place at 4am looking at the real state ad or owner's ad by the window?

In cities like Paris, calling a few minutes before others gives you the edge on securing the place for you! This idea would be a killer app in such places and it will be the natural transition between magazines and WebPages charging with SMS and the real world.

But why limit to real state only!
I had a similar idea a few years ago. Extend the idea to services, general information or even publicity (billboards, magazines, etc) and you have a complete solution based on the same implementation: People looks at something (anything!) that is interested on and sends a SMS to the code it shows for requesting more info, it then receives a SMS/MMS with complete information and even location based content (think of looking at a new product ad in the street, you send the SMS with the code and receive price quote, details and the nearest place you can buy it!).

+1 from me.

Cool idea, I think a lot of people would use it.

There is one potential business risk though .. Google could implement the same thing. They are already offering a lot of SMS info services: http://www.google.com/sms/

Not a bad idea, but in order to display the listing data in the US, you need to be a realtor in the area that the listing is in. So, as a company if you want to cover the whole country you would have to have agreements with realtors in every MLS district in the US, which there are a lot of. Then, there a bunch of different ways each little MLS district packages and formats their data. Not that this couldn't be done, but I would think an existing company that has this in place already could implement a SMS feed relatively easily.

Amazing! But seems to be away from the present. Today, it is very expensive and complicated to do something like it.
Do you know some experience like it in other markets or places?

In Canada we have http://www.mls.ca

You can get all the info about a house.
I would just use my web browser that I have in my phone.

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