"Hybrid" brokers, such as Glendale-based Right Home, are reinventing the process of buying and selling by combining the strengths of conventional service with the cost-saving convenience of the Internet.

"Our approach is simple," says Right Home President Paul Yalnezian. "By combining full-time salaried agents with in-house mortgage and escrow operations, we're able to offer buyers and sellers a more inexpensive and convenient process."

"But the ability to structure our business this way is due largely to the Internet," says Yalnezian.

Internet technology has spawned a number of Real Estate search engines, allowing homebuyers to search millions of listings (many of which are automatically uploaded from area MLS's) by price as well as neighborhood in just minutes. Many of these sites, including Homes.com, Homeadvisor.com and Homehunter.com, even have automatic email notification if a home that matches a buyer's criteria becomes available. These search engines are the fuel behind other Internet-based real estate service providers such as Ziprealty.com, Ehome.com and Erealty.com that actually transact home sales via their web sites.

"One of the best new technologies developed to aid in the home buying or selling process is the Virtual Tour," says Yalnezian. Virtual tours are created by "stitching" several carefully taken digital photos into a 360° image that is viewed through an Internet browser like Microsoft's Explorer. 

"We are able to save buyers and sellers hours of inconvenient physical showings by having all our listings available to be seen in this format," says Yalnezian. "And in this business, time really is money."

Right Home boasts a total transaction commission that often is as low as 2%, while offering buyers as much as 1.5% of the purchase price in the form of a cash credit.

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