Cell-phone service puts 'a realtor in your pocket'

House hunters used to rely on real estate agents for such information as the price of a home, its square footage and number of bedrooms.

But now a company called Smarter Agent is catering to the urge for instant gratification by making this information available to anyone whose cell phone is equipped with a global positioning system, a standard feature on many mobile phones.

Smarter Agent has teamed with wireless carrier Sprint Nextel (S, news, msgs) to offer the "Recently Sold" service for about $5 a month. Sprint charges $10 a month for its GPS data portal.

"It's like having a realtor in your pocket," says Eric Blumberg, president of Camden, N.J.-based Smarter Agent. "Basically, you hit a button on your cell phone, it gets your exact location and it pulls up the closest houses around you and tells you what they last sold for."

Because the data is provided by local municipalities, there's a lag time of three months or more, and the statistical profiles can vary from area to area.

Smarter Agent says its service is available in Philadelphia and parts of California and Florida. "Soon we will be active in tandem with top real estate brokers everywhere in the United States and even internationally," the company's Web site says.

Blumberg is marketing the service to real estate agents, home buyers and the merely curious with the urge to quickly know how much it'll cost to buy into a neighborhood.

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Blumberg expects agents across the nation will want to sign up as partners, providing the company with access to home listings as well as a steady stream of referral fees.

Real estate agents like Steve Storti hope that the service will lure more home buyers into a softening real estate market.

"It's a source of leads," says Storti, senior vice president at Prudential Fox & Roach Realtors in Philadelphia. "Now, all of a sudden, the inventory of unsold homes is way up, so what you really want now is more available buyers."

Within a few months, the company says, the "Recently Sold" service will be expanded to include available rentals, a complete listing of homes on the market in 180 metropolitan areas, and an instant wireless link to partnering real estate agents.

The ability to "spy on the Joneses" is not lost on Blumberg, who expects about half of the downloads to be made by the simply curious.

"I think it's fair to say that you're always curious about what your neighbor paid for the house," Blumberg says.