Why? Because I want to know how much my place is worth. It reassures me a little to think that if House A, which is on a smaller lot and has one fewer bathroom and no landscaping, is worth more than what I paid for my house, then I’m feeling good.

So a couple of days ago, I’m making the walk to my local grocery store to pick up bus tickets. (Yeah, I still haven’t started cycling to work. I know. I suck.) And I note a new for sale sign up on a lawn.

Being a Blackberry addict, I immediately type in the URL on the sign to get more info: www.bobblake.ca .

The web site was totally non-functional on my Blackberry Bold (right). Well, not totally non-functional. Just from the perspective of looking at houses.

Then I thought I’d go to MLS.ca. MLS didn’t work on the Bold either. Neither does the Ottawa Real Estate Board’s site.

Then I tweeted out to folks to see if iPhones suffered similarly.

Turns out, that even the iPhone or iPod Touch doesn’t help much. People were struggling to get the sites to work at all.

I checked a few other agents’ sites, and found a mixed bag. My pal Bob Daley’s site (Bob met us when he found us our house, and we’ve become tremendous friends) worked quite well on my Blackberry. Others not so much.

I cruised around the sites, cound’t find much info on mobile access. There’s a quite entertaining and nicely produced (if rigged) Flash game on the How Realtors Help site. The Ottawa Real Estate Board has this rather frightening Q & A:

Q. Why is the page not displaying properly for me? What browser should I use?
A. This site is best viewed with Internet Explorer 5.5+, Netscape 6.1+, and Opera 7.5 . Other browsers, such as Safari or Firefox, may not display the pages correctly.

According to Wikipedia, IE and Netscape releases date to July 2000. Firefox is into its fifth year of existence and holds nearly a quarter of the browser market. Opera has less than 1 per cent of the market, and Netscape is somewhere in the “other 0.97%”.

I’m not blaming Bob Blake for having a site that doesn’t work on mobile devices, and the only reason I’m talking about him is because he was listing the property that got me curious in the first place. I do blame his web designer a little bit.

I suspect that most real estate agents are too busy running the roads and making deals to think about this stuff, even though they’re probably power users of mobile devices themselves.

But it would seem to me that real estate agents, the companies they work for, and their professional associations need to ensure they’re serving their potential customers using the devices they choose, not 9-year-old web browsers built for dialup. They’re missing out.

I’ve e-mailed the Canadian Real Estate Association and the Ottawa Real Estate Board to see if they can explain this a little bit to me. If they respond, I’ll update the post.

Ciao,
Bob.

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