I’ve come across some interesting articles lately about mobile websites. It is actually a blossoming industry at the moment, and supposedly there will be some 300 million people by 2010 that will be using mobile phones and PDA’s. Have you been to your local cell phone shop lately? It’s hard to find a phone that doesn’t offer access to the internet. There is definitely some room for growth, but many experts seem to think that it will become a very competitive marketplace.

So what does that have to do with the real estate industry? Alot I think. There are 2 vital tools that real estate agents already use effectively, that adapt perfectly to a mobile environment: Maps & listings

Maps are already wide spread on mobile phones on many different levels. You have the stand alone mapping apps, the mobile versions of mapquest & Google maps, and even gps enabled phones that point the way.

But, to my knowledge there isn’t a solid surefire way to get access to listings on your cell phone. Of course, you could visit the local IDX, or MLS website, but do you really want to scroll through 30 screens for one page of content that probably won’t render properly anyway???

The only site I know of that is formatted as a mobile website is Trulia. They have a pretty decent tool to search for listings.

You could also use a tool like 411 Sync that will send you trulia listings:

text the word”trulia” with the zip code, and they will send you all the listings in that zip code. Or if the phone is web enabled, you can go to their site and search. A neat little Mashup…

• text trulia 80104 to
  415-676-8397 Or
• Mobile Search for trulia 80104 on wap.411Sync.com

Send Keyword to Phone

Wouldn’t it be a thing of beauty to tell your clients that your website is cell phone friendly, and that they could go to your website from their phone to look at your listings, or browse the MLS from your site? That would impress me as a client.

Since I’m admittedly not an expert on the subject, I want to refer you to some great articles I found:

• Search Engine Optimization for Mobile Phones
• Great little website that converts websites to text while you are browsing on your phone. (making them much more mobile friendly)
• Steps to format your site to be mobile friendly
• Create a mobile website from scratch
• Similar to iyhy.com a Google site that converts websites into an easy to read mobile format

This is one of those things that you could probably hold off on doing for a while, but might want to put in the back of your head. There are many web design companies out there that have just unveiled mobile website design, so there is obviously something afoot. The mobile SEO article I linked to above points out some key issues, one being that mobile search engine results can differ from the regular SERPs. I’m not sure if this is true or not… many of the searches I’ve done on mobile.google.com on my treo seem to show the same results. But there seem to be quite a few “experts” out there that claim that sites that are formatted for mobile web will automatically rank higher.

Something to think about…

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