Author Chat: Lisa Holton on her iPhone Real Estate Dictionary App

By Erica Christoffer, Contributing Editor, REALTOR® Magazine

Lisa Holton, a prolific Chicago-based real estate and business writer, has conquered the iPhone. Her digital book, The Essential Real Estate Dictionary (Sphinx Publishing/Sourcebooks), is believed to be the first real estate dictionary published on iTunes’ App Store. The dictionary features more than 3,300 definitions, abbreviations, and Web sites, serving as a handy, on-the-go guide for buyers, sellers, and professionals alike. Here’s what Holton had to say about enlightening the world of iPhone users to terms like “Monterey architecture” and “simple assumption.”

How did the opportunity to create an iPhone app using your book, The Essential Real Estate Dictionary, come about?

HOLTON: To a great extent it had to do with the current fortunes of the publishing industry. My publishing company Sourcebooks and I had been weighing the opportunity to do a traditional book-form dictionary. This dictionary had originally been published by Barnes & Noble in 2003. But Sourcebooks suggested that because we’re in a down-publishing economy, why not take the product and put it digitally onto a phone? Agents and other people in the building trades rely on their phones considerably. It would be nice for them to have this kind of information at their fingertips. I added terms over the years and terms that have relevance in today’s lending environment. Read more