The GPS Insider

With this morning’s housing numbers showing an 11% YoY decline in median home prices and a 9.6 month supply at the current sales rate, this deal raises some eyebrows. Mobile real estate listing company Smarter Agent recently closed a $6.2 million “oversubscribed” first round of funding. The round was led by private equity magnate Ira Lubert, who co-founded Lubert-Adler’s multi-billion dollar real estate fund, LLR Partners, Quaker Bio Ventures and Versa Capital. The funding will support the roll-out of Smarter Agent’s GPS real estate searches including a Homes for Sale application due to launch at the beginning of Spring. Smarter Agent has a service which lets people find houses for rent or sale near where they are when they make the enquiry—it launched on Sprint a year or so ago and gains subscription revenue though a monthly fee. It claims that over 25,000 people used the service over the summer and 35 percent placed calls to the agent/property owner.

That’s a nice-sized investment for the company and should help to get things moving. Right now they’re stagnating with just one carrier, Sprint Nextel (which happens to be bleeding to death right now). Integrating the apps with an ad model should work well. And with one third of users placing calls to owners/brokers there could be a really nice commission model there as well. It would make sense to push the app for free, although the carriers would never let that fly. I’ll bet that Apartments for Rent application will get some good traction with the foreclosure tidal wave upon us…

via MocoNews.net

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Very comprehensive LBS article in today’s New York Times by Larry Magid. No real meat for those already in the space, but probably mind-blowing for anyone else (I can track my kids?!?). The story is a who’s who of mobile location-based services, including Telenav, Loopt, Smarter Agent, and Trimble Outdoors. Here’s a brief excerpt from the article:

“Most G.P.S. navigation systems for cars only receive location information, but Dash Navigation, a Silicon Valley start-up, is now testing its Dash Express, which instead of adding G.P.S. to a cellphone adds a cellphone signal to a G.P.S. unit. The cellular radio transmits information both ways between the car and Dash’s servers. Every Dash unit continuously transmits its location and speed so, once there are a sufficient number of systems deployed to create a network effect, the company can determine the traffic flow on any road where Dash users are driving, including surface streets.”

Best of luck to them. And their VCs. These guys are up against GPS-enabled mobile phones, which will reach ubiquity in the next few years. Ironically, only the phone market will have the kind of saturation needed to achieve the network effect Dash is after.

audio interview with NYT writer Larry Magid on GPS devices and services:

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