Potomac-area software firms, seeing a growing eagerness among once-wary real estate companies to adopt 21st century technology, are launching new products and services aimed at linking the companies involved in real estate transactions — from real estate brokers to mortgage lenders to title attorneys.

"There is certainly a move afoot to automate the process. It’s definitely there," said W.B. Freeman, senior managing partner at real estate IT consulting firm Clareity Consulting Associates in Des Moines, Iowa. "Real estate, for all its scope and size, is as medieval as possible."

Some companies intend to automate the stages of the home-buying process, while others aim to integrate the various businesses so they can easily share information.

Guru Networks Inc. in Alexandria, Va., and SettlementRoom Inc. in Falls Church, Va., are among the companies with new systems ready.

Guru, founded in mid-May as a joint venture between software developer Open Systems Associates Inc. and real estate services company NM Management Inc., has launched its Guru Broker Network Solution. The Web-based software attempts to automate the real estate broker’s part of the process, from the initial listing of a property for sale all the way through the post-closing follow up.

SettlementRoom, founded in 1999, recently released an updated version of its eponymous software, which integrates with other systems to automate real estate closings for brokers, title companies, attorneys and mortgage lenders.

Guru plans to market its product to larger real estate brokers, including those that own title and mortgage companies, said Ike Broaddus, founder and chief executive officer. The product helps brokers manage their Web sites, e-mail, lead generation, multiple listing services, transactions, accounting and personnel.

He believes his is the first company to the table, thanks to a longstanding collaboration between the parent companies. "There are a lot of people trying to get into the space, but there’s probably a two-year ramp-up to build a product of this magnitude," he said.

The parent companies have funded Guru and he isn’t planning to look for investment capital anytime soon.

SettlementRoom aims to cut the time and cost involved in the settlement process, including the gathering and signing of legal documents that transfer ownership of a property from seller to buyer. Founder and CEO Jonathan Cutler believes demand for technology is increasing in that niche, too.

Unfortunately, it’s impossible to quantify either the size of the market or its growth, said Mike Thompson, a title industry consultant and editor of Settlement Services Today, an industry newsletter published by Condell & Co. in Hilton Head, S.C. In many states, any attorney with a license may handle real estate transactions, while real estate agents can show perhaps 10 properties a day or only a handful in a year, depending on how much time they devote to the profession. That makes it impossible to even know where to measure, he said.

But it’s his belief too that real estate professionals are increasingly motivated to speed up the process through automation. "In the last two years, that has really started to happen," he said. "Historically there was not much [electronic] interaction. The broker would just fax over documents or send a courier."

The key question software companies need to answer is why has the industry historically been slow to adopt technology beyond a PC and a desktop office suite? Was the technology unable to deliver the necessary value until recently? Have real estate brokers resisted change? Opinions vary.

"It’s mostly a change in the way [brokers] think," said Broaddus, who sees real estate companies bringing in $10 million or more annually as his prime market. "If you go back five or six years, there was no automation product that would solve all of a broker’s needs. So they bought little systems, but not something that would do everything."

Because of that, vendors haven’t perceived the real estate market as a great source of revenue. "There are probably 50,000 real estate brokerage firms across the country, but [only] about 500 that do more than 1,000 transactions a year," he said. "[The other] 49,500 of them could be happy with a shrink-wrapped software package," he concluded.

Those larger brokerages are the ones Guru will target, with its price set at around $75 per transaction, which equates to an annual cost starting at $75,000. That’s going to be a challenge to market, he admitted.

"You have to really show them that this solves their problems. This should let them cut 20 percent of their administrative costs and re-deploy those people some other way," Broaddus said. "We haven’t yet been able to demonstrate it, but I believe the ultimate real win for a broker is that the cost of Guru will be peanuts compared to the relative productivity of the agents."

Nevertheless, many real estate agents are still reluctant to adopt new technology, said Jeremy Conaway, president of Recon Intelligence Services, a real estate consulting company in Traverse City, Mich.

He said agents fear that automation will make them give up too much of the personal relationship aspect of the business, and the brokerage companies they work with — usually as independent contractors — won’t pay for a big ticket system if most of them aren’t going to use it.

By aiming their products at businesses, Guru and SettlementRoom are taking a decidedly different tack than consumer-oriented real estate businesses. Some companies that offer buyers the ability to browse complete listings of properties and let sellers list properties have crumbled, including Richmond, Va.,-based Homebytes.com, which closed May 1.

Freeman, the real estate consultant, said Internet companies have failed because they tried to be too different too quickly. "People thought that all the rules went out the window with the Internet. That’s not true," he said. "It’s business as usual over a new medium. The Internet did not create a new business model, it just speeds up things."

Title companies and lenders offer the most potential for software companies, said SettlementRoom’s Cutler, who predicts that products aimed primarily at brokers won’t survive.

Regardless of the specific segment a company guns for, it’s looking at a huge playing field, Cutler added. "There were 10 million real estate transactions last year, a combination of new home sales, resales and refinances," he said. "In any given year, real estate may go up or down 5 percent. Whether it goes down to 9 million or up to 11 million, the real estate market is a stable, established fact."