Don't mention the location

We already know that the net is great for people wanting sell things to other people.

While the big budget dot.coms struggled to suss e-commerce, and while established businesses fussed over e-procurement, mom and pop operations sprang up the world over, using online auction sites to trade collectibles, computer parts, and more collectibles.

Less than two weeks ago on these pages Jane Perrone wrote about her eBay addiction - one shared with enough fellow netizens, it appears, to drive eBay's profits up to £66m. For the first three months of this year, that is.

That's an awful lot of Beanie Babies being traded. And, certainly, the cuddly collectibles were the reason eBay was born, and continue to be sold in alarming quantities on the site.

But the eBay way of doing things is spreading to other areas too, which helps explain why - even in these difficult and uncertain times - business is booming. The site has created whole new trades in some items. But it also must, surely, spell bad news for other, more established facilitators of person-to-person transactions.

And - yes, estate agents - I'm looking at you.

Until you actually start trying to house-hunt online, you would think estate agents had leapt online both early and comprehensively. You'll find thousands and thousands of homes online, some with pictures, particulars and contact details should you want to take a look.

Actually start house shopping seriously, and suddenly the shortcomings become clear. We hear that location, location, location is what matters with a home. But many estate agents don't want to even show you a map of the area and the location of the property, even if it is technically trivial to do (link to Multimap, anyone?).

That makes it impossible to tell if you're at the end of the street near the nightclub, or the end next to the park. Handily placed for the station? Or right next to the tracks?

There are similar shortcomings with the online particulars - those little bits of estate agent-ese which provide the clues you need to make a decision to view, or ignore. Too many are a string of undescriptive cliches cut and pasted from the agent's front window: "WE ARE PROUD TO PRESENT THIS IDEALLY LOCATED PROPERTY IN A MUCH SOUGHT AFTER LOCATION IDEAL FOR FIRST TIME BUYERS." Well, gee, thanks for that.

Some fail to mention the number of bedrooms, or the asking price, let alone supply the extra information that might be supplied relatively painlessly in this internet age: a floorplan, additional photographs, details of local amenities or at least a link to upmystreet.com to let you see how busy the local criminals are.

This lack of hard, raw data about a home and its location weakens the whole case for the property sites. They do their best, letting you search for property by postcode, number of bedrooms, price and so on, with varying degrees of success. Maybe, thanks to them, you don't need to spend hours pouring over the classified ads, or traipsing up and down the high street, but a revolution this ain't.

But imagine the transformation in the process if, suddenly, there was more data attached to each home, in a standard format? And then, using that data, imagine what would happen if you could narrow the search perimeters to what you were really interested in?

Take, for instance, the mystery of the new-build three bedroom house: frequently a property so small it feels like a two up two down where the joiner has accidentally shoved in too many partitions. What if you could search by average floor space per room, or - better still - by price per square foot? Or rule out homes with a third "bedroom" too small for a bed?

Combine that with a postcode (or, better, street) search and you could instantly see which vendors were trying it on and which, genuinely, were priced for the quick sale. Suddenly, you could comb whole towns for exactly the kind of home you want, narrowing the search enough that you might want to physically visit only those on your shortlist.

We're a long way from that. Different estate agents use different online services. Searches are still too fuzzy, and home descriptions still have to be decoded, often on the basis of what is not said rather than what is.

Some estate agents are edging towards providing the raw, BS-free data buyers crave: they provide maps of the area, or they put the full particulars online, although these are still little more than a cut and paste of the paper versions. A tiny, enlightened few offer floorplans, to let you see the layout of the place before you visit.

Of the rest, you suspect the majority would say the system works just fine the way it is, and all these details would simply add to their workload and - by implication - the price they charge.

But last year's surge in house prices added, in London, 25% to prices and - because nearly all charge a percentage-based commission - 25% to agents' fees. As prices stagnate and, in the south-east, start to fall, and as property becomes much harder to flog, sellers might be entitled to ponder on what they are getting for the fee they pay.

Could the slowdown in the market, combined with the increasing penetration of the internet, be the catalyst for a revolution in the way we buy and sell homes?

As buyers become choosier about when, even if, they buy, vendors might find the only way to get things moving is to embrace the net. They'll realise the need to provide information - lots of it, too - to persuade people to make the vast commitment that buying a house is today. And they'll want to pick a middle man who can convey all that information as transparently as possible.

On current form, that could spell trouble for the laggard estate agent and his trusty bag of cliches.