Homes.com‘s slick looking mobile site at mobile.homes.com lets you search local real estate listings for residential rentals and properties for sale in the US. Listings include description, photo, map, asking price, address and the name address and phone number of the realtor offering the property. Search is by address, zip code or MLS ID. Results can be filtered by price, property type and number of bedrooms and/or baths and can be sorted by price or number of bedrooms/baths.

At first glance the site seems impressive. It looks great on my Android phone and returns dozens of results per zip code for my test searches in the San Francisco Bay Area. On closer examination some usability issues surfaced. Phone numbers are not click to call, which is inexcusable on a site designed for mobile browsers. Attempting to advance beyond the first page of listings returns a ColdFusion error. Although it doesn’t say so, the site seems to be optimized for the iPhone. Pages have a fixed 300px width and some functions require JavaScript. Things start to break down a bit on feature phones although the site is still at least partially usable on most devices. Without JavaScript the maps don’t seem to work and horizontal scrolling, overlapping text and images and missing button captions mar the user experience on some non smartphones.

Filed in: Wap Review Directory – Search/Real Estate & Apartments

Ratings: Content Usability

Ready.mobi Score: 2 “Bad”

Mobile Link: mobile.homes.com