Could You Find Your Next San Francisco Home While Grocery Shopping?

The real estate technology market has been flooded in recent years with “location-based” applications to help buyers find properties in their area. With little variation, they all work in about the same way:

• Start an application on your mobile phone

• Utilize your phone’s GPS to determine your location and

• Have the application retrieve location-based real estate data

But, what if you’re searching for San Francisco real estate and don’t even have to initiate an application to get real time real estate data?
What if while you were out and about, shopping or running errands, the home of your dreams just showed up on your phone automatically?
Sound like something from the Jetsons? Well it isn’t.
Advertising company Placecast has developed a service called ShopAlerts and there might be some cool uses for the real estate industry.
ShopAlerts allows users to opt in to receive marketing messages on their phone from retail stores that are nearby. For instance, a person would sign up for alerts from Tartine and would automatically receive tailored text message marketing notifications each time they were close to Tartine. 
It could work the same way for a house hunt.  You could opt in to receive alerts about specific types of properties – say 3BR’s in the Outer Sunset with Ocean Views.  Or properties in Pacific Heights between $3-5M.  And when you get close to one of those available properties, you cross a “geo-fence” which prompts an automatic notification to be sent to cell phone.
Essentially, a person lives their life and in the meantime, receives notifications about properties they’re close to that match what they want.
Question is, how many of you would use it if it where available? 
Feel free to leave comments below – and for more info on potential uses, read the full article here.