“Real Estate is where mobile apps go to die.” So said an associate of mine a few years back, after we sat through the umpteenth demonstration of “a multimodal approach to multiple listing services” complete with video house tours, mortgage payment calculators and status indicators for loan officers. That’s why a LiveMeeting with this morning was so refreshing. Randy Standard, president of the company gave us a guided tour, and his approach to creatively combining conversational technologies is noteworthy.

VoicePad offers a “white label” managed service to real estate brokerages. It enables prospective home buyers to take control of their search efforts by providing them with telephone-based access to basic home descriptions (size, price, configuration) as well as a number of other useful utilities (such as information about open houses, access to financing information and the like). For a flat monthly fee, VoicePad tailors the service for relatively large brokerages to enable their clients to “search any home from any phone.”

The service started out as the foundation for “audio tours” of listed houses. The company’s technical staff has built a library of audio files (over 175 for English and about half that for Spanish) that respond to callers with the house description, pricing information, the name of the listing agent and other pertinent data, based on keypad-based input of a street number and the first initial of the street name. It also gives the caller the ability to transfer to the listing agent to schedule a tour or discuss other options in real time. Callers can request text messages that summarize their search results. Househunters who register with agents will also receive email messages with a Google-maps based rendering of the houses they have visited along with pictures and descriptive information.

VoicePad differentiates itself from competitors based on both technology and business model. On the technology front, it has invested a significant amount of time in building the voice files that support the life-like rendering of MLS data. The target client is not the high-end smartphone (though they do have an app for that); instead owners of ordinary “feature phones” can use their keypads to dial the service and enter the street address.

On the business side, it offers its services to large agencies, rather than individual agents, which make up a community characterized by high turnover and extreme financial pressure. Standard tells us that the service has been especially well-received in areas under economic duress: like Las Vegas and Phoenix, where it enables house hunters to get information on a multiplicity of houses and let the system track their activity and send them results.

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