Home is known as the first place where we get our comfort. People are scared to relocate to other places. They feel restless to find a good plum area at their destination. Yet they are very selective on choosing a place to rent or own a house, because they are not frequently used to relocating to different places and afraid of their nearby ones. Here comes the idea of real estate app development to find their choice of place.
The Real Estate app has solved most of the parts. Not only people but several businesses have secured many advantages using mobile apps. Due to the high demand of the market, attains sudden interest in the property owner, realtor, and the customer.
Are you willing to dive into the market of Real Estate? Do you have a good sound of knowledge of it? If not, let’s get inside with us in this world of the exciting and thrilling market of uncertainties.
Introduction
Modern people are more mobile nowadays, several industries are booming, and unsurprisingly, real estate is one of them. With some prominent real estate apps out there, like Zillow and Trulia, it has become a lot easier for people to rent or even buy a house. It has been some time that the real estate industry has occupied a prominent place on the digital pages of websites & mobile apps.
Speculations are pretty strong, that in the coming days online real estate tools may even replace agents and brokers entirely. Now, this certainly sounds good in case you are a real estate agent, who is yet to go digital. Well, it’s never too late, and you also must know waste any further time to join the league of digital real estate agents.
Real estate app development is something that agents must invest in to keep pace with the time. This is the reason that interests in real-estate app development have heightened over some time. In this article, we have covered all of the basics of real-estate mobile app development, crucial features, team structure, the cost to develop, and a lot more scenarios.
In case you need to develop a mobile app for your real estate business, this article helps to shed a bright light on it.
Market & Growth Stats
According to the survey conducted by the National Association of Realtors, more than 75% of the people are searching for properties or spaces to rent on their mobile devices. For a more distributed ratio, 60% of millennials, 25% of GenX, and 15% of baby boomers are interested in investing in this sector.
Investing in the real estate sector is considered as one of the global investments. Singapore is responsible for making the best deals in the sector of real estate market. While the market for real estate is as lucrative. Let’s look inside more figures and stats why to invest in the real estate industry.
- The Commercial Real estate sector is expected to reach $710 trillion by the end of 2021.
- Asia Square Tower 1 and Qatar Investment Authority (QIA) have pioneered some of the best real estate deals with the investment of $3.4B.
- Whereas, one of the commercial real estate sectors named Indonesian Tycoon Tahir has attained a deal of $560M on buying Straits trading building in Singapore.
- The top contributors in the world are India and China in the Real Estate Sector.
- Zillow is one of the market leaders in the online real estate industry with 36M monthly users.
- Some of the leading market players in the domain of the Real Estate sectors are Frasers Centrepoint Limited, GuocoLand (Singapore) Pte. Ltd, Kingsford Development Pte. Ltd, MCC Land (Singapore) Pte. Ltd, American Tower, AvalonBay Communities, Gecina, Prologis, Welltower, etc. These are the major players that play their part in the business acquisition. Such vast emergence of various countries’ markets has impacted that the industry of real estate is highly marked soon.
- In March 2018, a private investment home, Ardian, invested $800M for commercial properties in Germany, Italy, and France.
- Singapore targets more for green buildings. As per the survey by PwC and ULI, 3,000 buildings are currently certified as green and increasing to target with 80% till the year 2030.
Challenges
The industry of real estate has transformed in many ways, from the beginning to the end. Apps are prepared customized to cover every aspect of the customers. Whereas, keeping the progressive grade-up solutions the industry has faced certain challenges too. Singapore alone have been facing some of the major factors including moderately growing economy, supply facility across the cities and filling the demands. Some of them you need to consider while developing your first real estate mobile app.
Budget-related issues: This is one of the most common issues in Real Estate Mobile App Development. The project manager needed to focus on the budget constraints, platform specifications, and other factors and keenly planned the optimized budget to enrich with the technological advancements to retain the customers for a longer time.
Security-related concerns: The security paradigm is the must-have thing to be focused upon. Many industries, vendors, stakeholders, customers, and realtors have invested their money in your mobile app, their primary concern is the privacy factor. Make sure that the app does not lack in giving them the thing which they are looking for.
Reach to the target audience: Plan out your target audience first, which will be beneficial for the growth and better reach of the mobile application. Making sure that the app is infused with feature-rich technologies, will help target the audience. Technologies like AI, VR, IoT, and many help attract different audiences. This can be a challenge and affects the cost.
Business Types
With the growth and the demands inside Real Estate, the vitality of different choices of mobile applications has paved their path in this industry. Adjoining every corner of the businesses, mobile applications played a good role. Let’s understand what the different types of apps fall under the category of real estate.
1. Property buy-sell apps: This is the platform for aggregator type, where people can sell, promote, or put their property on sale. The platform has the features to put various pictures, details of the pricing. This kind of app is an all-in-one marketplace that has a list of individual features on it, using the nearest location searching option people can find out the best possible properties. Various realtors place their ads inside the same platform and post on it.
2. Real estate company app: This app is the dedicated platform to deploy every notch of features in it including history, products, loan schemes, any upcoming project details, offers, and others relatable to a single platform. One such example is Godrej properties.
3. Indoor navigation apps: These kinds of apps are facilitated by advanced features including sensors, and AI/ML technologies to give a much broader aspect for choosing their space. The virtual tour inside the application gives users much more idea about the property at the comfort of their own. Although, it have costs a bit high while developing this kind of app.
4. Smart home (IoT) Apps: With the prolonged use of smart applications over the app, people can easily configure their app with smart devices to get more control over their things using the phone.
5. AR/VR real estate app: This technology helps to save time for the customers and get more knowledge about the app functionality. There is much higher scope in these technologies to open the channels of every application.
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How do Real Estate Apps work?
Before moving forward in the journey of the real estate market, you need to set some parameters to fulfill the expectations of customers. First, understand the workflow of the app.
- Research the market: Study the recent competitors which embark on their presence in this market, and then strategize your app idea plan accordingly.
- Compiled the important features: Based on the research, enrolled the important features inside the app, like filters, images, etc.
- Collect the proposals for rent and sale: There should be a separate database for the sale and rent of the property. Provide offers to the customers to get them more engaged.
- Finding the right company: Plan your budget and then choose the company that will be with you till the end.
Driving Force behind Real Estate Mobile App Businesses
Many of us have a pack of money but sometimes buying a property is not our choice. We are more interested in the good returns of our property, and that is a similar point of concern for the owner of the house or property. If I am a Realtor, my major concern is to retain the money for my property or for other’s property. At the same time, I am focused on giving quality services, optimized cost ratios to my customers. Real estate mobile application is the perfect single solution for both consumers and property owners, with the major goal to accommodate living spaces for everyone within budget. And that is the major driving force behind the market of real estate. Some of the important trends below are as follows:
1. More traction for the sub-urban cities: Cities in Singapore like China Town, Colonial Districts, Marina Bay, and Kampong Glam are recently facing humongous growth in the sector of real estate. In the coming years, there is going to be larger new demand and possibilities in the urban and suburban areas.
2. Growth in the residential and commercial sector: With the demand in the IT industry majority of the people are relocating to the urban areas. They are interested in living in a space that easily fulfills their demands within the cost. These applications are helpful options to consider for planning to move.
3. Concept of co-working spaces and co-living seeping: People across the world are gradually moving with the concept of sharing their spaces with others or co-working. This is one of the most budget-optimized ways for people to live. Many of the metro cities are slowly welcoming this concept.
4. Technology Advancement: New technologies have indulged their hands in the world of mobile applications and make a prominent effect to deliver advanced and highly functional services to consumers. Technologies like 3D and AI help to make prototypes and construct new buildings and spaces, to help the real estate businesses with their cost-effective solutions.
5. Redefining the concept of luxury housing: Comfort and luxurious life is not a satirical world for people now. They are prone to being compatible with the standard of living and elevate their life prospects inside society.
Business Models
Businesses have adopted different sets of models to run their ROI, gain revenue and hold their stake in the market of Real Estate Application Development. We have below provided a list of revenue-generating models that helps you to bring revenue and new opportunities for your business.
1. Commissions: It means for every deal between seller and the buyer or for placing an advertisement for selling any property on the real estate website.
2. Featured Listing: These models are for users who want to showcase their advertisements on the featured listing to get maximum visibility. This kind of model offers good results to the users.
3. Advertisements: This is the fairway of making money by placing ads at the specified spaces allotted in the website of a similar niche to real estate. Paid membership plans are there, property management companies have charged an amount for giving space to similar domain ads to the company.
4. Premium subscription: Based on the premium subscription the users get to be charged on monthly, quarterly, or yearly. This is the best model to engage people and run the revenues for the company.
Market Leaders
As per the survey organized by the National Association of Realtors, Real Estate Property search app development is widely used by millions of users. These mobile apps have added a beneficial perspective to home buyers, rentals, and investors in a much more convenient way. Users can manage to apply the filters like search by geography or search for the specific requirements including square foot filters and no. of bedrooms etc.
These apps give more power to the users by picking the options like apartments, rooms, flats as per their convenience and get back the required accuracy in the prices, customer support, and reliability.
1. Zillow: Founded in the year 2006, with the help of two former executives of Microsoft, this mobile app wins the hearts of millions of users. It comprises the largest inventory for a database of real estate, with a companion of its own Zillow property homes. Facilitate their users with detailed filter options. It allows you to share your property with other roommates.
Here in the Zillow app, advanced features like home locking within the app, make you more comfortable and secure for your home, even when you are not available in it.
Constantly the Zillow app has updated their databases to afford the best room and land for the users and realtors are also obliged without any hassle to convey their customers easily the properties. Businesses can generate their revenue using this app from advertising and other costs.
2. RedFin: It was founded in the year 2004 and is available on both of the prominent platforms Android and iOS with a rating of 4.4. It allows properties or housing for sale to their houses, townhouses, and condos. It charges a low cost for listing the property in the app with a fee of 1.0% to 1.5%.
RedFin has made a simple yet innovative interface to use. Users can choose the filters to get push alerts for their every choice. It has earned revenues by business lead, listing fees, and advertising fees. Some of the innovative features it has are like while searching house, it draws the map over the most predictable areas and suggests the best-optimized prices. Users can even find out the essentials to know more about their investments using the mortgage calculator, insurance, funding, etc.
3. Bigger Pockets: Coming with the idea to allow a choice of premium rooms and spaces to the tenant and the users within the use of fewer clicks, Bigger Pockets is one of the most popular networks for people. Right now it is only available on the iOS system.
It allows the user to resolve any kind of issues on the Forum. App composed with a specialized forum to answer any of the questions. With the presence of over one million users, it is one of the real estate networking hubs for marketing, resource gaining, deal-making, and other activities. Display every notch of information over the app with the alert messaging options.
4. LoopNet: LoopNet was founded in 1995, by the CoStar Group, in Washington D.C. It is among one of the best real estate web development and mobile apps under commercial properties. The app contains overall features like suggestions, neighborhood stats, other investments, and property facts. Realtors can apply the filters to share their property for lease. Plus there are other properties like retail, healthcare, office, and restaurants for sale.
Apply filters to choose the specific locality of place for rent, choose the construction year, type of land, and many more filters to get access to the best commercial listing brokers.
5. Realtor.com: Was founded in the year 1996, is best for finding rental areas for free spaces. The landlords of different properties list their properties here for free. It is a free app residing on both of the platforms Android and iOS, mainly gains its revenue with advertising.
General Features/Panels
For developing the application, it is a very important aspect to enlist the most important features and technicalities inside the application which plays a prominent part in the long run. Let’s understand below what are the different features for users, real estate agents, and for the admin.
For User:
- 3D property view
- Calendar
- Map
- Get brokers details
- Contact sellers via mails and inquiry messages
- Discussion forums
- Filters for sorting
- Favorites
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For Real estate agents:
- Register/Login
- Verification of profiles
- Search property
- Filter and sort property metrics
- List view and map view for property listing
- Get details of selected property
- View/edit user profile
- Add your property for selling or rent
- Purchase subscription for listing
For Admin:
- User management
- Reports
- Property manager
- Add/remove property
- Currency convertor
- Customer support manager
- Add/edit/remove subscription packages
- Earning management
Advanced Features
- Heat Map: It is one of the interesting ways to search for a new house using the variations of the mixed colors, different styles of searching, to yield the best results for your desired property. This app consists of a suite of information in the reduced time and offers actual site visits. Some of the features are more interactive including the budget, property dates, finding the nearby locations, and many more.
- Geo-Location Tagging: This option allows the user to search for the best nearby available options to choose from the list of properties. Users can turn on the current location for predicting the best available within a single click.
- Mortgage Calculator: This feature allows the users to easily calculate their monthly payment for estimation to set their budget and hunt for the house accordingly. It has an easy-to-use interface that allows users to calculate their new house purchases and plan their investments.
- Interest rate calculator: same as the mortgage calculator, this calculator is used to calculate the interests for home loans, estimate the payments, insurances, and taxes.
- CRM Solution: Customer relationship management software helps the business to easily manage the go and fro of messages and any alerts if required. This helps better boost real estate conversion. This software helps to manage the overall client data and other marketing promotions.
- Push Notifications: This is a great feature to get real-time updates inside the app so that users can miss any of the single updates.
- Custom mail reminder system: Those buyers who want to buy property will get reminders using this custom mail reminder system.
- Lead Management: This management system helps to generate more leads to convert the auctions into more deals. You can even track the activities of businesses and users.
- AR & VR amalgam: With the advancement of technology, AR/VR helps to demonstrate the homes in 3D for the users to get to learn and assume more about the property. This helps the users to make their decision instantly.
- ERP Solution: ERP is the all-in-one solution for managing large-scale operations including modules such as HRM, lead management, payment modules, business workflow management, and sales team management.
All of the above features have been examined carefully before being plugged into the app to meet the user’s requirements.
Tech Stack
To build responsiveness in a project a well-established technology stack is required that is embedded inside the app to convert your idea of imagination into reality. Some of the important technologies are as follows:
- BI/Visualizations: Tableau, Microsoft BI, Jaspersoft
- Databases: MongoDB, HBase, Oracle, Cassandra, Microsoft SQL Server
- Cloud storages: AWS, Azure, Google Cloud
- Query Tools: Apache Hive, Apache Pig, Flume, Sqoop
- Platforms: Openstack, windows, google app engine, windows azure, force, Linux
- Real-time analytics: Hadoop, spark, big data, apache flink, cisco, IBM
- SMS/voice/phone verification: Twilio, sinch, nexmo, plivo
- Push notification: PushEngage, urban airship, push woop, parse push, push.io, accengage
- Payments: Braintree, PayPal, stripe, wallets, credit cards, debit cards, net banking.
Required Team Structure for Real-Estate Mobile App Development:
A talented pool of team members ensures the fast delivery of the mobile app. The development team comprised a pool of talented experts to understand the client’s requirements and align every aspect inside the application.
Project Manager: Responsible for smooth functioning of the project cycle, manage the whole project and arrange coordination between team and the client.
Business Analyst: One who starts bidding to convert them into the client, understands their requirements, and deals with the price of the project.
Developers: Android and iOS developers to develop the app
Designers: They are handling the designing of the app to give a surreal experience to the users
Quality Analysts: They check the bugs and assign the rectification to the manager and then the manager passes it to the respective team members.
Cost of Development
The cost for the development of the real estate mobile app depends on various complexities including the size, location with different zones, languages, and other constraints.
Based on the different zones:
- US-based developers charged: $100-$250/ hour.
- Singapore-based developers charged: $60-$160/ hour.
- India-based developers charged: $25-$50/hour.
Other factors deciding the cost of real estate app:
- Technical Documentation: $1000-$2000 with a time of 40 hours.
- UI/UX design: $1500-$3000 with a time constraint of 50 hours.
- Front end and back end development: $10,000 to $20,000 within the time of 400 hours.
- Testing: $2000 to $4000 within the time of 80 hours.
After combining the overall factors the cost of a real estate mobile app with essential features lies between $25,000 to $50,000. With the embedding of advanced features like AI/ML and other complexities, the cost of the real estate application would go around $70,000.
Conclusion
With the evolution of smartphones as the new normal to the users, searching for their homes can’t be a hectic and time-consuming activity for them. But during the traditional time, people looking for their houses or rooms are helpless and get stuck in the loop of realtors or property dealers, and can’t get correct information as well as proper cost estimation.
After the extensive use of real estate mobile applications now the people are not dependent on incorrect information. Apps are specially designed to equally value; consumers, brokers, and agents. It comprises the latest stats and market trends, includes advanced features and filters, and many other options to keep their users updated in real-time.
You must look for an expert development team, which has a well-balanced work ethic, fierce business models, development process, maintenance, and services to fulfill every aspect and need of the customers. Selecting a reputable company is very important that is honed with skills and their testimonials themselves speak to the quality of experience they have delivered to their clients. Octal Info Solution is just a perfect blend of quality with the determination of their work. We can navigate your ideas of business values and project scope to the sky of the panorama.
