QR Codes for estate agents and property marketing

Now as many of my friends are well too aware, I've recently become the proud owner of an Android phone and I'm generally quite excited about what it can do.  One of the Apps I discovered recently was a Barcode Scanner.  More often than not I've used it as a bit of a gimmick, a party piece if you like to demonstrate that my Android phone can do all sorts of interesting things.  Recently however, I discovered these interesting variations on bar codes called QR codes.  You've probably already seen them around and may not know what they are.  In fact it's growing quite popular to have t-shirts printed with them on!   They're basically a 2 dimensional barcode that can store quite a reasonable amount of data, just over 4000 characters they can be used in a number of applications.  One of the more recent and interesting use of QR codes is to store a website URL.  But why store a web address in a barcode thingy you may be asking?

Quite simply its a very convenient and easy way to advertise a website.   The number of people out there with very capable mobile phones or smartphones as they are called is growing rapidly.  These phones can at the push of a button scan the QR code and open the browser at the desired website.  No messing around trying to type in an address.  The printed t-shirt, scanning people thing is a bit of a geeky fun I suppose, but there are other seriously useful application that QR Codes and smartphones can be used for.

For example, I was walking home from the shops the other day and as usual, my mind was doing a bit of wandering as well.   As it happens I walk down a street where there are often a lot of houses for sale.  The property market seems to have picked up quite a bit in our area judging by the number of "For Sale" signs I pass every day. 

It suddenly occurred to me that instead of looking up the property details when they get home, potential buyers could scan a QR code on the sign and find out all about the house right there on the spot.   I know they can go to the Estate Agent's website and eventually find the house.  They could probably use Layar as well, but the simplest way of getting right at the information there and then would be with a QR code.  Point, click, bam... and you're in the estate agent's website looking at the property details and price. 

I did a bit of a Google search when I got back to find out if any of the big property sites were doing this yet.  So far I've only found one letting agency in the UK and one in New Zealand.  So my advice to the likes of Rightmove, Connels etc. and even all the smaller outfits would be to get in there quick and don't miss out. I'd imagine it would be a straightforward task to generate QR code when entering property details onto the database.  Some sort of waterproof sticky label would be needed but I don't think that it would be too great a challenge.

If you're interested in QR codes there's some more information on the Wikipedia site and there's a QR code generator that you can use to test them out.