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Buying and Selling a Home From Your Computer

A new Web site will debut on Sept. 25 that will allow home sellers and buyers to haggle, cement a deal and see it through completion — all online, and all without the help of a real estate agent.

RealUmbrella, the brainchild of Laguna Hills, Calif., chief executive officer Bryant Katzen and chief technology officer Michael Updegraff, is a patented system that will guide sellers and buyers through the home-sale process, from the initial listing to the final closing. Using a secure server, sellers who list their home through RealUmbrella will be able to view comparable listings on the site to set an asking price for their property, post their home listing on popular Web sites like Zillow and Trulia, and upload a schedule online of open house dates for buyers to see. Using contract forms that are legal in each state, buyers will be able to make offers on homes, secure financing, and arrange for inspections and title searches. Because the site will allow for electronic signatures, the entire process will take place online. Theoretically, a transaction could take place without the buyer ever seeing the house, or the seller and buyer ever meeting in person. 

Costing between $349 and $949, the service is a bit more expensive than marketing packages sold by most other for-sale-by-owner sites like Owners.com and ForSaleByOwner.com, which also offer numerous self-help tools like contract forms and links to lenders. RealUmbrella’s higher fees are justified because it brings all of the elements of the sale into a single integrated platform that all parties in the transaction can access in real time, Mr. Katzen says. “We tie everything together,” he says.

RealUmbrella will have few listings, at least initially. When it rolls out, the service will only be available in California, and Mr. Katzen expects that it will collect just 150 to 350 listings a month. Within 120 days, however, he expects to expand from coast to coast and hopes that the service’s listings will “expand exponentially.”

Of course, the Web already allows home shoppers to appropriate much of the information that used to be controlled solely by real estate agents. In fact, industry statistics say that eight out of 10 shoppers start their home search on the Internet. Will this new service be the “killer app” that renders agents’ service obsolete?

Walt Molony, spokesman for the National Association of Realtors, says that’s not likely. He says that the trade group’s research shows that more than half of Web surfers begin their searches on metropolitan multiple listing sites or on the industry’s own Realtor.com. For-sale-by-owner (FSBO) sales are at “historic lows” of only 12% — and 5% of those transactions occur between people who already know each other, according to NAR. Furthermore, he says, no matter what tools a Web site offers, many buyers and sellers will still want a professional to guide them through a home-sale transaction.

But Mr. Katzen, 28, thinks the role of real estate agents is rapidly changing. A real estate agent since the age of 21, he blasts the current system that churns out agents “with less hours of training than a hairdresser gets.” Given that most agents handle only a handful of transactions a year, he argues that they’re neither as expert nor as experienced as the public is led to believe — and are therefore overpaid for what they do. In the future, he expects, Web tools that empower FSBO sellers will force agents into speciality niches that serve time-pressed clients. (Mr. Katzen already does–he specializes in investors.) “Realtors will have to be repurposed,” he says.