Bypassing estate agents with computerised house selling

On page 53 of The Book of Visions - An Encyclopaedia of Social Innovations (Institute for Social Inventions, 1992), Steven Burkeman proposed bypassing estate agents by requiring everyone selling a house to enter basic details on a form that would then go on a computer. Two members of the Internet Creativity group (run by Keith Hudson - accessible under the 'Teams' heading via the New Civilization World Wide Web page at http://www.newciv.org/worldtrans/newcivnet.html) have extended this idea. The gist of their comments is as follows.

One could take several pictures of any house on the market with a digital camera, and link the pictures to a World Wide Web page on Internet, so making the details available worldwide.

One could also create a bidding and auctioning capability via the same Web page, including blank legal forms.

Bob Hiltner, e-mail address: bobhilt@eskimo.com.

The use of computers to sell homes need not stop there. If you have seen the game Doom you would realise that a building could be represented in such a way that the prospective purchaser could walk through the building on his or her terminal akin to the virtual reality world.

Steve.Robinson, 63 Elms Park, Coleraine, Northern Ireland BT52 2QF (tel 01265 58435; e-mail: <cdrj13@mgvax.ulster.ac.uk>).

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