THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, June 25, 1994 TAG: 9406250188
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: D1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DAVE MAYFIELD, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: 940625 LENGTH: Medium
GSH Residential Real Estate Corp. said Friday it plans by late summer to start putting its listings of properties for sale in Hampton Roads on the Internet.
{REST} It would be the first local real-estate agency - and one of the first in the world - to do so, and its listings would be accessible to an estimated 20 million Internet users worldwide.
``We're looking for any advantage we can get,'' said Harold E. Smith Jr., senior vice president of Virginia Beach-based GSH, the third-largest agency in Hampton Roads behind William E. Wood & Associates and Long & Foster Realtors. ``As more and more people in the world are out there playing with computers, a lot of them are going to be using them to look for homes.''
GSH plans to tie into the Internet via a Norfolk-based access provider called InfiNet, which is majority-owned by The Virginian-Pilot and The Ledger-Star.
InfiNet, like other access providers, is trying to set up a virtual marketplace on the Internet. GSH would be one of the first paying ``tenants'' of InfiNet's electronic mall. The Virginia Diner in Wakefield, a well-known restaurant, has also committed to use InfiNet starting July 1 to sell its food products to cyber-shoppers. The restaurant also peddles peanuts and other goodies via CompuServe, the big on-line network owned by H&R Block Inc.
Internet commerce is ``still in the nascent stages,'' said Michael Neubarth, editor-in-chief of Internet World magazine. ``But with the amount of publicity the Internet is getting and the number of businesses looking at the Net and looking at competitors who are looking at the Net, it will become more common.''
Allison Askew-Hahn, online advertising manager for Landmark Communications Inc., the Pilot and Ledger's parent company, said several other local real-estate companies besides GSH ``have shown a definite interest and, I believe, are going to do it, too.''
Real estate is ``a very undeveloped area'' for companies like his, said Michael Ryan, president of Pinnacle Online Inc., another Norfolk-based Internet access provider. He said he, too, has talked with managers of local real-estate agencies about including them in his company's planned electronic market.
GSH's Smith said he started talking with newspaper managers last year about linking into Internet.
One reason for GSH's interest in getting its listings on the network, he said, is the great number of people in the military who transfer each year to Hampton Roads from across the country and overseas.
The military population in general is better-acquainted with the Internet than the population at large, Smith said, because the Defense Department was an early user of the network.
Neither Smith nor Askew-Hahn would discuss financial terms of the GSH-InfiNet agreement. Smith said GSH will pay a fee for the listings and that GSH's 350 agents will share in the costs if they want to include biographies of themselves or extra photographs of homes for sale. As many as three full-color photos or other images will accompany each listing, he said.
Initially, he said, GSH will probably list on Internet about 500 of the roughly 1,100 listings it has on average.
Other agencies will likely follow GSH's lead, said Darlene M. Lamb, president of the Tidewater Association of Realtors and a vice president of Prudential Decker Realty.
She said 95 percent of her association's 280 member agencies are already hooked into Metro MLS Inc.'s on-line network, enabling their agents to call up listings and home photos on their personal computers.
Listings on the Internet will put pressure on multiple-listing services to keep innovating, Lamb said. ``But I don't really think this is going to devastate MLSes.''
{KEYWORDS} INFINET INTERNET ADVERTISING
by CNB