Here are the highlights of the survey:

Top 3 smartphone brands used by respondents:

• Blackberry (41.2%)
• iPhone family: iPhone 3G (14.1%) ; iPhone 3GS (11.9%)
• Palm (14.0%)

Top 3 reasons why respondents were motivated to choose current smartphone:

• Best device for email (45.9%)
• Ease of use (26.2%)
• Ability to use a keyboard (23.7%)

Top 5 features used most by respondents on their smartphones:

• Telephone (91.2%)
• Email (88.4%)
• SMS/texting (73.8%)
• Calendar (52.6%)
• Web browser (42.3%)

For general purposes, social media related apps were the most popular type of application downloaded by survey respondents (54.5%). This was followed by maps (43.3%) and weather applications (41.8%).

When it comes to MLS listing information:

• 57.3% indicate they have access to MLS listing information through their smartphone’s web browser.
• On a scale of 1-5, where 5 is extremely satisfied – respondents rated their overall satisfaction with the MLS listings available through their smartphone a 3.12.
• 10.7% do not have access to listings via a smartphone because their MLS does not allow it.
• Of this group, 94.4% are very interested in obtaining access via their smartphone.
• 11.4% are not interested in accessing MLS listings via their smartphone.

Out of all this data – the one that is the most disturbing to me, is the MLS info.

Only about HALF of smartphone users have access to MLS data on their phone? And 10% don’t have access because their MLS won’t allow it? REALLY?

It really boggles my mind that agents would not have full and complete access to this data from any internet connection – laptop, desktop or smartphone. I know many times the problem lies in that many MLS’s only work on Internet Explorer – which yes, is still the top web browser but unfortunately it also usually contains the most bugs. Many tech-savvy and smart agents are working from Firefox, Chrome or Opera – just to name a few. In addition many MLS’s are not compatible with Safari – the main browser on a Mac or iPhone. I hope NAR and the Center for REALTOR® technology will help move many MLS’s into the future!

This topic is sure to be a hot debate at Real Estate Connect during our MLS Track held in the afternoon on July 14th.

FOREM fans – what do you think of this survey? Would love your thoughts and opinions – please leave me your feedback below!

Written by: Katie Lance, Marketing Manager, Inman News

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I realize as a mom, I am a bit biased writing this blog post. Here are 8 really cool iPhone apps perfect for Mother’s Day and appropriate for everyday life as a mom! I know there are many Realtors and Brokers out there who are moms and grandmas – this post is for you!

8 Brilliant iPhone Apps for Mother’s Day:

Mother’s Day Cards and Frames app ($1.99)

Send all the Realtor moms you know a a virtual card. This iPhone app let’s you create a custom Mother’s Day card by accessing  photos on Facebook from your library. Then, you can post the card on her wall or print out the actual card.

Kids Eat For: Free! ($2.99)

On a budget? What Realtor isn’t these days?! Kids Eat For will help you find a local restaurants offering a Kids Eat Free or discount specials.

Kidtivities ($1.99)

Do you have a child 2-6 years old? This app provides 100 fun and educational activities for you and your child to do together. Most of these activities are inexpensive (or free) requiring the use of nature and/or materials already found in the typical home.

Baby Monitor & Alarm ($2.99)

How cool is this app?! Turn your iPhone into a baby monitor — no matter where your baby falls asleep. Just enter your home phone number or tap in a new number and place it next to your sleeping baby. When iPhone hears your baby wake up, it calls you. Gotta love technology!

1800 Flowers (FREE!)
Flowers are a Mother’s Day must! Pick out a beautiful bouquet and get it sent to right away!

Spa Finder (FREE!)

What Realtor (or anyone for that matter) doesn’t need a spa day? Over 5,000 spas listed. Automatically locate spas closest to your current location. Discover deals and last minute special offers!

Don’t make your mom cook on Mother’s Day! The best thing to make for dinner is reservations! These are also fantastic apps to have when you need to pick a new restaurant for a client meeting. Here are my 2 favorite apps for that:

OpenTable (FREE!)
With OpenTable for iPhone you can make free restaurant reservations at over 13,000 OpenTable-enabled restaurants in the United States, Canada, and United Kingdom.

Urbanspoon (FREE!)
Can’t decide where to eat? Urbanspoon can help. Shake your iPhone and the Urbanspoon slot machine will pick a good restaurant for you to try. Keep shaking until you find a restaurant you’re happy with.

**Wishing all the moms who read FOREM a very Happy Mother’s Day!! Side note – if you are a Realtor mom – please do not work on Mother’s Day! No open houses for you! Take the day off and enjoy!

Would love your comments and feedback. Leave me a comment below!

Written by: Katie Lance, Marketing Manager, Inman News (and mom to a 2 and 1/2 year old and one on the way!)

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Here are my 5 favorite Easter apps:

Dress Eggy (FREE) – Dress up your virtual egg with fun patterns, icing designs, cute backgrounds and fonts. When you’re done, record a message that gets delivered with your Easter postcard.

Easter Scratch (FREE) Make a scratch-off Easter card, similar to a scratch-off lottery card. You can even customize the card with personal photos. Cards can be shared on Facebook, Twitter or even e-mailed to non-iPhone users who can virtually scratch their card with the click of their computer mouse.

Egg Painter ($0.99)
Decorate eggs without the mess. Great app to keep the kids entertained at the Sunday brunch table!

Flip Eggs (FREE)
Remember playing the memory card game as a kid? This is just like it but with eggs!

Easter Quizzle (FREE)
More than 150 questions to test your Easter knowledge!

BONUS: Not Easter related, but have you seen the new App Store Facebook Page – pretty cool!

Do you have a favorite iPhone app? Leave me a comment below!

Written by: Katie Lance, Marketing Manager, Inman News

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Planomatic seems to really have hit the nail on the head. The coolest part of this product is that the consumer can interact with it.

Once you click on the floor plan, you can pick from a drop down menu and choose which room you’d like to ‘decorate.’ Once you select the room, you are given a large variety of ‘furniture’ to choose from – including colors and styles, as well as the ability adjust wall and carpet colors.  I really like that a lot of thought went into the interactive part of this app. For example, you can pick different styles and colors of furniture – which really help to ‘put you in the house’ and paint the picture of what it would be like to live there.

One thing this app has going for it is the ‘fun factor.’ If I was a buyer, I could definitely see myself using this app especially for homes I was really interested in. It could  help a buyer make that decision when they are wondering:  “Is this the house for me?”

Kori Covrigaru, the CEO of Planomatic says, “It’s quite unique, and in my opinion (yes, I’m obviously biased) the coolest thing to hit virtual tours/iPhone in quite some time.”

To access the app – tap this link  from your iPhone – Safari will recognize that it’s on the iPhone, and automatically display the PhotoPlan Mobile:

Interactive FloorPlan Presentation

There are other great floor plan programs out there such as: United Lane or Floor Planner but none have the interactive iPhone app that Planomatic has.

According to Kory, the BlackBerry and Android apps are on their way!

What do you think of this app? Would love your opinion of it!

Do you have a unique or new product coming to the market? Drop me a line at katie@inman.com or post it in the comments below.

Written by: Katie Lance, Marketing Manager, Inman News

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In real estate, having a smartphone is not just an option but a necessity. Everyone wants a response right now, not later today.

So the question remains, can the leader, the iPhone still hold their lead in 2010 as the top smartphone in the United States?

According to Nielsen…
According to Nielsen, The iPhone is still the most popular smartphone, followed by the BlackBerry 8300 series, but despite all the new smartphones flooding the market, Motorola’s trusty Razr (yep, the RAZR!) flip-phone was the third most-popular phone of the year.

What about Andriod?
Comascore.com, a leader in measuring the digital world, announced a few days ago the release of its latest report on the mobile market, ‘Android: Crashing the Smartphone Party.‘ The report provided an overview of the current U.S. mobile environment and offered an in-depth look at the Android OS. Among the report’s key findings is that consumer awareness of Google’s Android is growing rapidly, due in large part to the Verizon Droid ad campaign.

Here comes Google!
Coming to the smartphone party (possibly) next month is Google’s Nexus One. Nexus One puts Google in business against other providers of Android-based phones. Google is the major force behind Android. Will this create a backlash against the company, or did other providers get into the Android game aware that Google eventually would make this move?

A major shift happened…
A new survey of smartphone users by PC World and Macworld found that 85% of smartphone owners were extremely or very satisfied with their handsets, and the same percentage said they rely heavily on them. On a typical day, people use their phones two-thirds of the time for personal use and the balance for business. This highlights the HUGE shift that happened with smartphones from being primarily a corporate use to gaining a wider consumer customer base, courtesy of the iPhone.

So what is it about the iPhone?
I think one of the biggest reasons consumers, especially real estate professionals, love the iPhone is because of how easily they work – not the mention the incredible branding campaign that Apple has done to make you “feel” extra cool when you own an Apple product!

Did you know?
Did you know, Apple didn’t even launch the iTunes App Store until a year after the first iPhone became available? Over 2-billion-apps-sold have been sold as of late September 2009.When the iPhone was first launched in June 2007, Steve Jobs tried to sell developers on just making Web apps. When Web-based apps couldn’t match the performance or capabilities of native apps, developers asked for more. Apple announced that they were changing course in October, but didn’t launch the App Store until July 2008—just as Apple released the second generation iPhone hardware

So, in the spirit of the holidays, and because I do love the iPhone, I wanted to share with FOREM readers 7 FREE new iPhone apps just released within the last few days:

1. Ribbit Mobile
This app has already gotten quite a bit of buzz. You have to sign up and request to be invited to their beta trial. Ribbit Mobile will read your voicemail and then text or email it to you, it will save your messages forever, you can dictate memos on your phone, and answer calls on any phone.

2. CallRec.me
Pretty cool app especially for real estate agents –record your phone calls and voice notes with the push of a button. I could see this being especially helpful for agents to keep track of conversation records.

3.  HWA, Inc. – Home Warranty of America
Videos, sales tools, what’s news, and much more. Great app for title/escrow officers, mortgage lenders, real estate attorneys and agents. I’d love a Realtor’s first-hand experience using this app.

4. iParked
Ok this app was made for me – it helps you remember where you parked your car! If you dare to go shopping in the next couple days, I recommend using this app!

5. San Francisco Tweets
Search by categories or by SF districts. I like that it is a live Tweet stream so you could theoretically be walking down the street toward a restaurant and see if there is anyone inside the restaurant tweeting about the food, service, etc.

6.  New York App
Look up shows/events, places to eat, bars/clubs, tourist attractions, Yelp reviews and much more. Cool factor: there are links to some of the best lifestyle blogs in NYC built right in and a NYC Twitter stream. Not bad! Can’t wait to check this one out in person next month.

7.   ConnectNYC
Saved the best for last! This app is specifically designed for Real Estate Connect NYC  Jan.13-15th (#ICNY) includes live Twitter feeds, conference schedule, what sessions are starting within the next hour, exhibitor and sponsor booth info, as well as NYC hot spot info.

So how do you feel about this smartphone debate? Are you loyal to your iPhone, Blackberry, Andriod, or Razr? Are you holding out for something else?

Leave me a comment or send me a tweet here or here!

Written by: Katie Lance, Marketing Manager, Inman News

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The app is very well executed and joins StreetEasy and Redfin as among my favorite real estate apps.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hb91e0jqQIk[/youtube]

To promote the new app, they commissioned Swedish artist Kari Modin to illustrate the key features of app. The ads will run in media outlets, online and on phone kiosks throughout the city.

The images are striking and I think it’s an important takeaway here; while real estate search apps are a hot ticket item right now — and I would suggest that any decent sized brokerage should be seriously evaluating their mobile strategy for 2010 — simply building and releasing an app isn’t enough.

It needs to be fully baked into to your overall marketing plan and supported through a well-imagined and targeted advertising campaign, which Corcoran has done.

There’s a land rush going on right now for screen space on smart phones and the window of opportunity for any broker to stake a claim will likely be short-lived. A few years from now and there will be likely dozens of “me-too” apps in any given market. Now’s the time to strike.

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Using the app you can now shoot off-the-cuff video walkthrus of your listings on your iPhone 3GS and post them immediately to WellcomeMat, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook.

From their post on their blog:

Do it yourself video just got a helluva lot easier and we are glad to be the company making it happen. The Flip camera got us one step closer to video being easy to do, acting as a hard drive for videos that are shot in web-ready formats. Now people can post their videos straight from their iPhone: no chords, no format changes, no compression and no barriers.

I think this is a phenomenal step forward for real estate video — though I’d love to see it have even greater integration with some of the more real-estate specific search sites; Realtor.com, Trulia, Zillow etc.

More importantly than Realtor produced videos however, what really excites me is an app like this opens up the realm to anyone, armed with an iPhone, to create on-the-spot, near real-time video assessments of properties.

Privacy concerns aside, properly curated and geo-tagged video reviews of properties could be a boon to online house hunters. It would take Google’s Street View to a whole new level.

Let the cameras roll!

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[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/6006262[/vimeo]

The application is very similar to Zillow’s iPhone app (see Zillow Takes Zestimates to the Streets); which also displays home values – but for me, the street level view is far more visually exciting than the top-down, satellite view presented in Zillow’s app.

The MeilleurAgents.com app uses the Layar Reality browser, and the app will be available shortly for the iPhone 3GS in France.

The release of iPhone 3.1 update now technically allows apps to overlay graphics on a live video stream, so we’re inching closer to true augmented reality. Some apps in the US already take advantage of this, the Yelp app’s hidden monocle feature for example.

The promise for augmented reality real estate applications is certainly exciting; virtual for-sale signs and property descriptions, even the layering of interior room photos over exterior views of home.

I’m sure  we’ll be seeing much more of these sort of apps in the months to come.

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Homes.com joins the ranks of Trulia and StreetEasy this week and announced the launch of a new iPhone application (iTunes link).

The app is functional enough and grabs its listings from a combination of broker feeds and from the network of websites run by Homes.com parent Dominion Enterprises, which runs the Advanced Access, AgentAdvantage, eNeighborhoods, and Number1Expert web sites.

Real estate has been an exploding category on the iTunes store (though not at the same pace as tip calculators and fart applications), and so far we’ve seen a handful of the aforementioned search portals jump into the fray and even seen some of the brands join the frenzy (see Coldwell Banker Launches iPhone App). 

Ultimately however,  all of the dedicated real estate apps on the iPhone have a fairly standard feature set that includes maps, driving directions and property detail pages. And most take advantage of the iPhone’s location awareness too to show you any nearby properties.

But the problem with these apps frankly is that they all suffer from biggest issue affecting their desktop counterparts as well. Lack of inventory. Or lousy inventory.

This becomes even more apparent in a mobile environment when a listing that clearly has a for sale sign in the yard (especially one that you’re standing in front of), doesn’t appear in your search results. Or you when the property you’re being guided to has been removed from the market. 

House hunting is a natural fit for the mobile platform (see House Hunting On The Go) but suffers greatly from these inaccuracies. While the big search sites may have all but tied up the experience on the desktop, the palm top is still wide open. While there have been iPhone optimized web sites (like Intero’s) that are MLS backed unfortunately they haven’t moved to becoming dedicated apps yet and so suffer a little from the slight.

There is a real opportunity for an MLS driven search solution here, whether it be broker driven or association driven, to corner the mobile market in local markets. I, for one, am still waiting.

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I’m a pretty heavy iPhone user, the thing is pretty much attached to my hand at all times… but one thing I didn’t expect was how much I’ve come to depend on it while on the road; to get directions, to find a particular store or get restaurant reviews. It’s a fantastically powerful device to have in the car, but one that’s incredibly dangerous too.

The iPhone’s touchscreen means that it’s very hard to type without looking at the screen, so it usually means I have to madly scramble while stopped at a red light to find what I’m looking for.

vLingo (iTunes store) solves this problem. Now you can speak to your phone and it understands you.

It’s voice recognition for your iPhone, much like the recent voice search feature added by Google, but vlingo takes this one step further; not only allowing you to perform Google searches but local searches (on a map) and even voice dialling your contacts all in one.

As a bonus, you can even update your Twitter or Facebook status by voice as well. vlingo instantly transcribes your spoken words to text and sends them out.

It’s pretty amazing. And lightning fast. Give it a try.

vlingo, iphone

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