The person asks you if you know of any large properties in the area. What do you do? One option is to invite them to your office to check out the latest listings available. That might not go over too well, however, as it might look like you're doing a hard sell. Another option might be to carry those big, heavy MLS (Multiple Listing Service) books with you all of the time, but that's not exactly casual.

What if you could pull out your trusty Palm handheld with the latest MLS information downloaded to your device? Now that's cool, and with Pocket Real Estate (at http://www.pocketrealestate.com), it's possible.

Pocket Real Estate is a program for handheld devices that allows you to keep the latest MLS data on your Palm handheld. The Multiple Listing Service is a list of properties on the market, and these listings contain information about the property such as price, location, TMK (Tax Map Key), square footage, etc.

Pocket Real Estate is put out by a company called HAND e CORP, a Honolulu, Hawaii based-company that develops and markets handheld solutions for vertical markets, with a primary focus on the real estate industry.

Pocket Real Estate is a great tool for any real estate agent because you can access the most current MLS information each time you perform a HotSync operation. As you can see in Figure A, there are many functions in Pocket Real Estate.

FIGURE A

Pocket Real Estate has quite a number of functions.

PocketRealEstate includes several types of calculators, which are shown in Figure B.

FIGURE B

You can make your calculations quickly with Pocket Real Estate.

There are calculators to calculate loan payments, the amount of equity in a home, or information on whether it would be better for someone to rent or own.

There's also a mortgage calculator, which is shown in Figure C.

FIGURE C

A good real estate agent always keeps a mortgage calculator handy.

These are great to have if your client wants to know how much the monthly payments would be on a mortgage. Of course, as an agent, you'd have to have the latest interest rates to enter into the equation, but if you're on top of things you already have that information.

The major functions of Pocket Real Estate are the search functions, QuickSearch and Properties. QuickSearch, shown in Figure D, has limited search capabilities.

FIGURE D

QuickSearch is good to use if you know what you're searching for.