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Company Profile: Pocket Real Estate

Hand e Corp’s Pocket Real Estate is a suite of products that enable real estate professionals and consumers to access real estate information, including MLS data, via handheld computers and mobile devices.

With Pocket Real Estate, agents can spend less time in the office and more time in the field: prospecting, listing, and selling properties. Core functions include those necessary for a real estate agent using a handheld computer in the field to be effective with their prospects and clients - property details, searching, and statistics, real estate calculators, contact information, client profiles, and mapping.

Pocket Real Estate is currently distributed and used in virtually every state in the U.S. and was recently introduced for use in Canada. The company has contracts with almost all of the major MLS Systems in the U.S. to support Pocket Real Estate.

Pocket Real Estate currently runs as a distributed application, where agents download real estate data from their MLS vendors in a custom Pocket Real Estate format, and then transfer the data to their handheld device using the normal synchronization process. Realtors will also soon be able to access MLS information via wireless handheld computers and mobile phones using Pocket Real Estate Wireless.

Our users consider mapping displays on handheld devices a key component of their real estate “toolkit”. Rather than developing customized mapping capability on the handheld, Pocket Real Estate provides seamless integration with existing mapping applications.

Application of mapping:

Pocket Real Estate for the Pocket PC was released in the first quarter of 2002. After this release, we began to investigate Pocket PC mapping applications that could be integrated with Pocket Real Estate. As developers, we needed a mapping application with:

• good vendor support
• an interface that would allow us to pass a property address programmatically

Our users needed:

• a reasonably priced, easy to purchase, easy to install mapping application
• maps that are simple to create or obtain
• maps that provide good street-level coverage of the entire US and Canada

We chose Microsoft Pocket Streets 2002, which comes bundled with both MapPoint 2002 and Streets and Trips 2002. Users can either generate maps on their desktop or download pre-made maps from the Microsoft Pocket Streets website. After an agent uses Pocket Real Estate to select a property, two quick clicks display the selected property on a Pocket Streets map. Pocket Streets pushpins show the MLS number and property address. Users can even select a default map that will always be used for Pocket Real Estate mapping.

The update for Pocket Real Estate for Pocket PC with support for mapping with Pocket Streets 2002 will be available in early May 2002.

About Pocket Real Estate:

Hand e Corp, founded in 1998, is a developer of software and solutions for handheld computers and mobile devices. PocketRealEstate.com, a division of Hand e Corp, sells, markets and supports Pocket Real Estate, the real estate industry's premier software program for accessing real estate data on handheld computers and mobile devices.

PocketRealEstate.com continues to develop new products that take advantage of the most recent developments in handheld computer technology. These include wireless data transfer, e-mail and integration with electronic commerce companies to provide real time real estate and financial transactions. Pocket Real Estate Wireless, the result of a joint effort between Hand e Corp and Wireless Wisdom Inc., will allow agents to download thousands of listings on their handheld computer and access new listings with their mobile phone, using the same familiar Pocket Real Estate interface on both devices

The company’s website is at http://www.pocketrealestate.com.

	MP2Kmag Internet