Johannesburg, 01 Jun 2006
USP Designs' CyberAgent Mobile real estate mobile solution has been nominated for a ComputerWorld Honours 21st Century Achievement Award in recognition of its innovative use of technology. The winners will be announced at an awards ceremony on 5 June in Washington, DC.
CyberAgent Mobile technology is built on Sybase's iAnywhere mobile business platform, which has been customised specifically around the requirements of the real estate industry.
Pat Jewell, director of operations at USP Designs, says her company created CyberAgent to help real estate agents manage their property and contact information in an offline environment in-hand, while in the field, to help them capitalise on their valuable time and eliminate wasted trips back and forth to the office to download information.
"CyberAgent provides real estate agents with the ability to administer, catalogue and publish properties and photos online, without being anywhere near the office," she says. "Real-time wireless connectivity allows agents to input and access property and transaction information anytime, anywhere.
"CyberAgent Mobile enables estate agents to multi-list properties within the agencies, to manage contacts and build a contact and personalised mobile database of all key information, resulting in increased productivity and revenue generation."
The agent can capture new information, including pictures, on-site without leaving the seller's side. Once all relevant information is captured, the seller can then view this information, making sure of its authenticity, before the property is submitted to the public Web site, Jewell explains.
"Potential buyers can also view this information from the mobile device without having to go onto the Internet or physically go house hunting, ensuring the agent always has relevant information on-hand to show buyers their best options," she adds.
"We see CyberAgent Mobile playing a vital role in the future of real estate as more agents realise the benefits of how their business can be enhanced keeping them steps ahead of their competition with the use of handheld technology and innovative solutions such as CyberAgent."
There are over 64 000 registered real estate agents in South Africa, and even though the product is relatively new, CyberAgent Mobile has already signed up 200 real estate agents to date.
According to Gerard Sofianos, General Manager at Sybase SA's iAnywhere division, building the CyberAgent Mobile application on the Sybase platform enables 'always available' computing, providing both secure wireless and offline access to information. "This enables real estate agents to access the information they need, when and where they need it, regardless of the bandwidth available," he says. "The key to this solution is that Sybase is bringing its extensive experience in the mobile arena to market to provide complete solutions to the property market."
Sybase is considered by Gartner to be the number one mobile middleware market leader and has more than 12 000 customers and 1 000 partners worldwide that rely on the company's industry-mobile enterprise solutions. The company's AvantGo mobile Internet service has more than 10 million registered subscribers.
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