Pretty soon, the whole idea of using a computer to search for homes to buy might seem downright quaint. That’’s because the action has moved to your mobile phone. Of course, you can still sit at your PC or laptop and troll through listings, but real estate industry players know that house hunters spend an inordinate amount of time in their cars, so they’’re laboring mightily to top each other with real estate tricks for phones to perform.

Real estate search sites are rolling out phone apps (or applications, to those of us whose existences haven’’t been infiltrated by smart phones) on practically a daily basis. But if all you have is a not-as-smart phone, don’’t despair: There is a decidedly ‘’un-app’’ offering. A few days ago, Realtor.com rolled out an iPhone app that would seem to do everything but make the down payment for you. The free download (available at iTunes.com) puts property shoppers in direct touch with all the home listings at Realtor.com, the biggest of the real estate search sites. It also enables users to do tailored searches, save notes, take pictures and send links to the properties in real time via e-mail, Twitter or Facebook, in case you want to solicit others’’ opinions on a candidate house. The app also will figure out where you are and let you know about open houses within a 20-mile radius, and triggers the phone’’s GPS features to help you find them.

This is Round 2 of phone technology for Realtor.com, according to a company spokesman. In 2007, it launched an app for Windows-enabled smart phones and PDAs. The new one focuses on the iPhone, she said, because of its popularity. But here’’s another significant consideration: The users of iPhones are strongly in the 26-40 age range, a demographic that is most likely in the coming months to be house hunting in order to take advantage of the federal income tax credit for homebuyers, she said. In the ‘’un-app’’ category, we have a ‘’location-aware mobile real estate search Web site’’ from the Sawbuck.com brokerage, which recently began operations in Chicago. The company takes pains and, perhaps, even a certain amount of pride to point out that this is not an app. Sawbuck Mobile doesn’’t require a download, make you open a separate program to see search results or specify a mobile platform such as iPhone, Android or BlackBerry.

Sawbuck acknowledges that opening Web sites on the average phone can be uncomfortably slow, so it claims this search is optimized to load quickly on phones with slower connections. On an Internet-enabled phone, go to http://www.m.sawbuck.com , and the site knows where you are and offers up nearby listings and open houses. (It beat the Realtor.com GPS claim by about a week.) Published on: January 21, 2010