Fledgling company Archinet - devoted to creating a design-orientated Web forum for architects on the Net - is already using advanced software to enable users to walk through buildings and get a 360 degree view. The facility could just as easily become the show homes of new developments.Estate agents remain sceptical about the World Wide Web's potential. "There is no substitute for face-to-face selling and the tactile quality of paper," says Nicholas Shulman. Most agree the Internet is slow, unwieldy and offers a limited British audience (around 3.5 million, of which only 500,000 are private users) dominated by recreational techno-nerds. But web-sites are cheap and as, Stuart Goldenburg of Goldenburg & Co points out, "the Net is giving us 24-hour exposure to a global market." Contracts are being exchanged across continents through the Internet, but the British market in cyberspace still has far to go."At the moment, we see it as a useful complementary medium for all our existing marketing, but forecasts suggest that 50 per cent of households will be on-line by the turn of the century," says Charles Philpot of PMC. He believes that estate agents who ignore the Web's potential will do so at their peril.

A search for a detached house with two, three or four bedrooms, under pounds 130,000, in the Reading/Newbury region produced six examples. As databases build, users will be able to narrow the criteria and get a longer list of suitable properties, all suffixed by phone numbers and e-mail addresses. And IEAI and HomeCo are already providing "virtual home tours" - allowing buyers to step inside a property by clicking onto the door or the window of any room.At the moment, this facility is limited to pages of "hyper-linked" interior photographs, but there is a future in high-resolution, 3D home tours. Eventually, says co-founder Ben Horton, users will be able to home in on any town or region and get a choice of dozens of properties for sale in that area. HomeCo's subscribers are currently limited to areas of London, the Midlands, Cambridgeshire and Edinburgh.

"We hope to become the Yellow Pages of Internet property links," says Ben, who admits he needs to attract many more subscribers before his hopes are realised. He is offering space to both estate agents and private vendors free of charge in order to establish a market.HomeCo invites users to specify residence type, number of bedrooms and price range and then sweeps a chosen area for all properties in that category. "For buyers it will be like walking down the high street without leaving their homes," she says. But although IEAI has signed up nearly 40 regional estate agents, the geographical net is still limited to East Anglia, Essex and east London.A similar property search service is provided by HomeCo ( http:// www.home.co.uk.), which claims to provide links to pounds 200 million worth of property for sale, but like IEAI's the database is still at an early stage of construction. "Putting up an un-networked site independently is a bit like putting a message in a bottle and throwing it into the sea," says Cega's Canadian-born managing director Christina Ayer, who aims to provide a "one-stop property shop" on the Net. Independent Estate Agents on the Internet (IEAI), for example, was set up by Cega Ltd ( http:/ www.cega.co.uk) and takes the form of an electronic property newspaper, combining a number of agency pages in one interactive location.

The secret, he says, is in knowing how to get your name in a prominent site in an easy-to-access directory.In the property field, a number of specialists are helping to create wider audiences for small players by offering places on Internet umbrella databases. According to Gwyn, the successful use of the Net relies on "skilful cyber-marketing". Now his Internet pages are generating up to 3,000 responses a week More than 70 per cent have come from abroad. At least one is likely to buy into the final phase of the development as a result of using the net.