Brett Eddy and Tom Parrish of Windermere Solutions

For years, real estate agents have used bound and printed marketing materials to convince home sellers that they have what it takes to sell their home. Known in industry parlance as the CMA or competitive market analysis, these multi-page documents can take hours to research and prepare.

Brett Eddy, the chief technology officer at Windermere Solutions, the newly-formed Internet arm of the giant Seattle real estate brokerage, thinks they’ve discovered a better way.

Using the iPad, which Eddy calls the “sexiest” platform on the planet, Eddy and his crew have created a dead-simple way for real estate agents to create an interactive competitive market analysis report. That means, instead of printing out a massive paper document for the client, agents can simply present their research using the touchscreen device.

Windermere Solutions CTO Brett Eddy

The beauty of the interactive iPad version is that agents can alter the text, maps or photos on the fly. That means if the agent finds another comparable house to include or wants to add materials about local schools, they can easily add those.

“All of this data just shows up. You don’t have to go construct something. You don’t have to go build in Excel. You don’t have to do some of the fancy stuff,” explains Eddy. “We built all of that logic for you.”

After the CMA is completed, Eddy said it can be easily emailed to the client who can then choose to print it out in a PDF format if they’d like. But Eddy said he thinks many people will prefer bypass that option, adding that a “lot of trees have died” in order to create the old-school CMAs.

“We really don’t need that. We consume everything with your Mac Book Pros or your phones,” he said.

About 45 Windermere agents have been testing the new app, and GeekWire this week got a sneak peak. Tentatively called Touch CMA, the app is set to debut next month at the big Inman Real Estate Connect conference in New York and later at Windermere’s 40th anniversary celebration.

Windermere Solutions plans to sell Touch CMA for about $15 per month. It will be available to both Windermere agents and those outside the network, part of a strategy by the technology spin-off to build tools that service the entire industry.

Here’s Eddy showing off the new application:

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