Property: House-hunting for couch potatoes, or how to get a mouse to do the walking

From Acton to Ashby-de-la-Zouch, and from Anguilla to Zimbabwe, sellers and buyers are successfully marketing their homes in cyberspace. For buyers, it means seeing the place without having to go there. For sellers, it means displaying a home without having to show people round. Robert Liebman goes online to observe property being conveyed in bits and bytes.

Ian Jones, a British expat based in Belgium, knows a good thing when he sees it: summer in Britain. He also knows a bad one: winter in Britain. Attending to winter first, Mr Jones turned on his computer in his Brussels office and, in deference to his wife's native country, explored Portugal.

"My wife and I have a grand plan, which is to spend the dreaded winters in the Algarve and to enjoy our summers in England," says Mr Jones, who is closer to the end than to the beginning of his working life. "That scheme is for retirement, which is still some years away, and I also want a refuge now."

To be appealing, a property would have to keep up with the Joneses' conflicting interests. "I play golf; my wife doesn't. With a country club, I could play golf and she could lie by the pool or play tennis. We also wanted a place where we could walk to buy a loaf of bread, or to the beach."

The Internet was a logical starting-point, especially for a costly and time-consuming cross-border property excursion. Mr Jones started with two search engines and applied a simple, basic research method available to beginners and experts alike: "I used Yahoo and Alta Vista, keyed in the word `property', and quickly found Portuguese weather and maps and properties. I found a website for the Alto Golf and Country Club and some other places, and many of them contained pictures of the various homes and grounds. I was gobsmacked by all the things the Internet gave me."

Although he accessed these websites during his lunch breaks, Mr Jones was able to share the visual delights: "I downloaded the pictures and brought them home for my wife to see. I was able to show her what the apartments looked like."

Before spending a single centavo on petrol, the Joneses had already made considerable progress. "We would have bought anyway, but the Internet gave us a good advance feeling and gave us the spur to go down there," he says. And Alto has sent them maps to help them find their way.

The Internet also helped them eliminate unappealing properties in advance. "We went from door to door, looking at all sorts of properties. Some of the developments I viewed on the Internet I disliked. That was the end of that - no driving around, no wasted time looking."

They chose a two-bedroom freehold house at the Alto country club, and as soon as they returned to Brussels, an exchange of e-mails between the Joneses and Alto started the ball rolling. Conveyancing turned out to be "easier than buying a house in England", says Mr Jones.

Obviously proud of every inch of its golf course, Alto, which is owned by the British construction firm John Mowlem, left no hole unturned in its virtual marketing programme. "Our web pages contain pictures of the resort, floor plans of villas and apartments and even a diagram and description of each hole on the golf course," explains the managing director, Michael Foundly. The website contains an e-mail link so that virtual visitors can request more information to be sent to them by ordinary post.

Although he has successfully bought a property, Mr Jones is maintaining his Internet skills: "I may want to let the Portuguese property, and I can do that through the Internet too." Although in no hurry to buy a UK property, he is casually trawling property websites for their summer dream house in the south of England.

When he conducts his UK search in earnest, Mr Jones will find an abundance of relevant websites. British banks, building societies, estate agencies and other property-related organisations are well represented on the World Wide Web. As is common on the Internet generally, many websites are inter- linked. This is especially important for Internet newcomers, who can find many relevant websites from a single fertile source.

One such site is Home to Home, which enables its viewers to receive a mortgage quote, order home insurance, get the gas boiler serviced, and choose among thousands of homes in all areas and in all price ranges.

Home-to-Home's Best Buy Mortgage website was prepared by John Charcol, the UK's largest mortgage brokers. Under "mortgage services", the Home to Home site lists more than two dozen other websites, from Abbey National to the Woolwich. Each of these can be accessed by a simple single click on the mouse.

Home-to-Home also contains "a weekly mortgage best-buy page, property comment and analysis containing area profiles and information about schools, communications and local tax bands". Founded by two former Fleet Street journalists, Alan Frame and Neil Mackwood, Home to Home describes itself as an Internet magazine, and lives up to its name with plenty of timely and informative features and news articles.

One notable omission on Home-to-Home is Barclays Bank, whose website features Call Me, a device which enables the viewer to request a telephone call from a live Barclays representative, who phones you immediately or five minutes later. Look no further to discover why property transactions in cyberspace are booming.

Contacts

Alto Golf and Country Club, 2nd floor, Europe House, Bancroft Road, Reigate, Surrey RH2 7RP (01737 222022) (in Portugal, 00 351 82 410820; fax: 00 351 82 410830); website: http://www.altoclub.com

Barclays Bank: http://www.barclays.co.uk

Home-to-Home, Positive Publishing, 88 Kinsgway, London WC2B 6AA; 0171 242 4033; http://www.home-to-home.co.uk

Other property websites

http://www.houseweb.co.uk

http://www.homehunter.co.uk

http://www.property-sight.co.uk

http://www.uk-property.com/uk

http://www.propertyworld.co.uk