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Web eases vacation home buying

In the 1980s, Diane Saatchi was a real estate agent who worked out of an office without a fax machine. Her company didn't make overnight mail available to agents. She was the first in the office to get one of those blocky, newfangled cell phones.

Now the fax machine and overnight mail have fallen out of favor at Saatchi's office at the Corcoran Group in the tony Hamptons of Long Island, having yielded to e-mail and the Web. Saatchi e-mails purchase contracts and photos of houses to clients, and those potential buyers conduct much of their research on the Web.

And if they have some quick questions to ask, they e-mail them to Saatchi's Blackberry wireless device (so addictive that she calls it the "Crackberry").

Vacation season is the time of year when tourists fall in love with their destinations. They begin to dream of buying beach bungalows or mountain hideaways. They don't want to disrupt their vacations with days of house hunting. So they turn to technology. The Web and e-mail make it easier for people to shop for vacation homes long-distance.

Wise use of technology is a necessity to reach some home buyers. Karen Hoth, a school librarian in Marathon, Fla., says she does a lot of online research before she and her husband, Gary Dickinson, buy property. When they peruse real estate Web sites, they tend to skip over the listings that offer little information.

"In the new Internet age, I think a lot of people have trouble understanding that you have to be very forthcoming on your Web site information for people to think it's worth their time to get more information," she says.

In 2003, Hoth and her husband bought a house in Spring Hill, Fla., north of Tampa, as an investment property. Now they are buying a condominium in Fort Myers, on Florida's Gulf Coast about a four-hour drive from their home in the Keys. Both times the Web played a large role.

They searched for potential properties on the Web (Hoth's favorite site was Realtor.com because it gives a lot of information) and e-mailed a bunch of real estate agents, then communicated with the agents by e-mail and phone. By the time they drove up to meet the agents, they knew specifically which properties they were going to look at so they wouldn't waste time.

Hoth was familiar with Spring Hill because her parents had bought a house there in 1998 and she visits it two or three times a year. But she and her husband knew little about the Fort Myers area when they started looking for a place that they could rent out for part of the year and use as a getaway in summer, when school is out and the Keys are sweltering. They started researching Fort Myers on the Web, determining which neighborhoods they might be interested in.

When they found the condo they eventually decided to buy, the real estate agent was getting ready to take some photos to e-mail to them when they found an online virtual tour of an identical unit. That sold them on buying the condo unit.

"Folks like my parents would never, ever consider purchasing property like this, ever," she says. "They're of retirement age and would rely solely on a Realtor to find properties and show them to them."

Paul Howarth, who works for a mortgage bank in Southern California, did something that a lot of people might dream of doing, but few actually do: He bought an acre in Fiji after finding the lot online. He plans to build a house on it someday.

The land is on remote Koro Island. "It's a little bit of an ordeal to get there," Howarth says. "I have to fly into the capital and stay overnight and take a plane to an island called Savusavu." From there, it's a two-hour boat ride or a short flight in a plane.

It's a quiet place where homeowners collect water that runs off their roofs, and where many people use solar power. There aren't many cars, but quite a few wild horses. One expatriate from San Francisco summons horses out of the jungle by whistling.

Howarth's lot is on a hillside, and when he eventually builds on it, "any window you look out in the house is going to see ocean."

He found the land after about an 18-month process of trial and error. He researched land-buying in Mexico, Costa Rica, Belize and other places. All of them presented problems. For example, Costa Rica allows squatters to claim land after they have lived on it without being kicked off. Eventually he discovered the benefits of buying land in Fiji: Foreigners can buy land and own it outright, there are no squatter's rights, and no property taxes.

He e-mailed attorneys in Fiji, e-mailed and talked with the Fijian consul in Los Angeles, and on a Usenet newsgroup (an online bulletin board) he found Americans who had bought property in Fiji and could answer more questions. "It would have been a tough thing to do without the Internet," he says. "I don't think it would have happened without the Internet."

Howarth eventually felt comfortable enough to go to Koro Island for a week. He elected to buy the hillside lot instead of one on the beach. The cost: $22,000, about 90 percent financed by the seller. That was about five years ago, and Howarth hasn't been back since. But he plans to visit next February or March.

"I have old mango trees on the lot and I'm going to plot out where I'm going to place the house," he says. He will plant mango and coconut trees around the home's footprint, so that when he builds the house in about 10 years, it will be surrounded by mature trees.

Even more than the Web, Howarth can thank e-mail for making it possible to buy his one-acre slice of paradise. It allowed him to communicate with people on the other side of the world when it was convenient for both parties. That, says Saatchi, the real estate agent on Long Island, is key: "E-mail has made the time differences go away," she says. That's important when, say, a buyer is traveling or living in Europe.