Real Estate App Development

By Author: Alfred Nadeau
Total Articles: 1
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According to the 2019 edition of Inman Disconnect, homebuyers and real estate agents will swap roles over the next five years. In the future, agents will seek clients as opposed to homebuyers seeking agents. The number of real estate agents will shrink, and only the most competitive will remain. How can you seamlessly connect agents with sellers and buyers? Let’s find out how to do this in the rapidly changing market.

Matching customers and agents

The following three brands have already built their real estate businesses around the principle of matching.

Nobul.com is an online Canadian real estate marketplace that allows agents to compete for clients. The service enables buyers and sellers to compare agents’ services and decide on the agent they prefer. On Nobul.com, a buyer/seller describes the type of real estate they want to buy/sell. Interested agents can then reach out with their offerings. Nobul charges agents a 20 basis point referral fee – $2,000 per $1 million of real estate value – for closed deals.

Property Whispers is an Australian matching platform that covers the residential ...
... marketplace, including real estate that’s advertised for sale and that’s for sale off-market. The platform is appreciated by agents, brokers, and vendors since it helps them get the contact information of matched buyers. In a world where traditional advertising campaigns cost thousands of dollars, the platform charges agents only $99 plus GST per listing (with a free trial provided). Private vendors, in turn, pay only $139 plus GST to list their properties.

Homes.com is also built around the matching principle. With the platform’s Snap & Search feature, buyers just take a photo of a home they like and the service helps them find similar ones. In addition, the platform provides a kind of conversational search. It navigates a buyer to their ideal location providing average area pricing by helping buyers choose criteria that matter to them the most. Filters such as “must-have” and “around” (for approximate pricing) enable users to find relevant listings. All property results have a match score on a scale of 0 to 100, showing how closely a property matches the user’s preferences.

Virtual tours and video walkthroughs

It’s obvious that buyers want to physically examine a property before buying it. It’s also great that people can minimize travel to homes they would like to see thanks to virtual tours. With virtual tours, homebuyers don’t need to schedule multiple real estate showings before deciding on a property to buy. Virtual tours are especially helpful when people want to purchase a house overseas.

The Zillow 3D Home feature, which is totally free for listing agents, integrates with Zillow and Trulia listings. Agents just have to capture panoramas and the app automatically creates a tour. There are also apps dedicated solely to virtual tours. Realync allows users to interact via live video and audio, take pictures and notes, and send messages. Each tour file is automatically saved to the cloud for later access and sharing.

Video walkthroughs are another common practice to show properties remotely. Walkthroughs are short videos of a listing recorded by a mobile phone or some other device. The Zillow Real Estate app (iOS only) has a feature for recording such videos.

Real-time messaging

Real-time chats enable a constant connection between a client (the app) and the server. In this case, the server knows the online/offline status of each user and can make sure messages are delivered instantly.

Learn more about mobile real estate app development