WebProNews

Texting an address to HouseFront's messaging service brings back available real estate information to one's mobile phone.

Upon seeing Resource Shelf's entry about HouseFront, a house value service with mobile access, we had to wonder if this was the best time for yet another real estate online venture. Housing prices have dropped for 10 straight months.

An optimist would consider this a ground floor opportunity, and entrepreneurs ooze optimism. Like Trulia and Zillow (the latter also offers mobile real estate info), HouseFront delivers a variety of data about a property to the on-the-go house hunter:

Property information includes: Estimated Value Number of Bedrooms Number of Baths Total Square Footage Year Built Property Owner

Public record information can vary for properties, which means HouseFront could have more or fewer details about a property available for a query.

HouseFront needs to work on the speed of its SMS answers. A pair of queries I submitted as a test each took several minutes before they returned a response. Their website works quickly, comparable to HouseFront's competitors, so that offers another option to mobile device owners with web browsing available.

The web side of HouseFront has a free account signup, where users can set up updates on properties they wish to track. They can send a property listing to a friend, or leave a comment about the property on its profile page.

Though HouseFront advertises a database of 100 million homes, their focus appears to be on major population centers. Zillow does this too, meaning places like the WebProNews home of Lexington, KY, don't have listings in either site's database yet.

The real utility of HouseFront will come over time, as they expand their back-end capabilities in terms of responsiveness and breadth of content.