How to Build a Real Estate App?

How to Build a Real Estate App

As the real estate market is thriving in the spectrum of the present-day digital world, a real estate app development might be a strategy to upscale your company and bring homeowner surfing to the next level of convenience. Based on a research report by The Business Research Company, the global real estate market had a 9 percent compound annual growth rate in the past year. The market went from $3,386.11 billion in 2021 to $3,690.55 billion in 2022. Among these, the global real estate software market is predicted to touch $15.8 billion by the year 2027, according to the Globe News Wire. There is an enormous potential for your company to boom amongst the modern customer demographics if you can bring the market to the comfort of their hands.

How to Build an App for Real Estate

Transitioning to the realm of the digital market after your agency has built a strong base in the physical market can be tricky at first. You are now looking at a whole new customer base or traditional customers transitioning their marketing experience from physical to digital, just like you. There is a list of factors you need to consider to ensure you are following digital marketing trends while nurturing the unique selling point of your company that your customers have appreciated in the past.

Here is a list of factors to consider when developing your real estate app:

1. Determine the Idea and the Target Audience

What do you want to achieve with your real estate app? Who are you aiming to help? Answers to these questions can help you build a strong idea you want to focus on and who you want to do it for. This is where your agency’s qualities, style, and theme come into play to build a presence digitally. Specifying what part of the market you want to focus on aligned with what you have to offer as realtors can help establish a concrete idea to revolve your app around. 

Similarly, your audiences play a key role in determining that idea. The majority of customers are switching to mobile conveniences in today’s world. And with that, there is an entire generation stepping into the age of exploring the real estate market, and with your app, you are opening the doors for their easy accessibility as well. Understanding the demographics will help you gather a target audience. And working around their needs will enhance their experience with you.

2. Research the market 

There are bound to be differences between the traditional and the digital market, especially the wide area the digital world can easily cover. The market will naturally cover a wide range of services, and your competitors are rushing to cover every one of them. So when developing your real estate app, there is pressure to upscale your services, attain its relevance, and keep sparking its need in the market. 

You are introducing your audiences to that wide-scale market. Therefore, researching is a crucial step when considering what you can offer. With detailed research of the market, you will be able to identify how you can build your online presence with strategies that resonate with a convenient user interface for your specific customers, tools to guide more traffic to your application, and keeping up with the ongoing trends of the real estate industry.

3. Locate a Developer

It can be overwhelming to find the right developer to bring your ideas into reality in a world where most organisations and companies are looking for one to build a digital presence. It would be best if you had someone who could work with your concrete idea and understand your vision with this app. Someone who understands the audiences this app is targeting and caters to what they are asking for. Someone who can help you improvise and improve your concept by connecting to their developing experience. Make sure you explore with many developers to find the right one to fit your needs and criteria. 

4. Finance the App

Financing your real estate mobile app’s build, use, and maintenance is another important part to focus on. You need a stable finance plan to ensure your application is built for the best customer experience. From constructing to consistently handling the backend requires more effort, cost, and human resources. Regular maintenance and upgrades are yet another crucial part, and your agency needs to put its financial focus on budgeting these aspects so they are being done regularly and on time. 

5. Promote your app

All the efforts put in making your real estate agent app deserve recognition within and outside your regular customers. There are endless opportunities to make this new addition to your company known. Social media promotion and advertisement are the most efficient medium of promotion, and you can easily pop your app ad in and amongst the social media feeds of potential customers. You can also lean into traditional marketing strategies, creating brochures, posters, advertisements, or even person-to-person promotions. 

Building a Real Estate App

Now that you have decided having a mobile application is best for the growth of your real estate agency, it is time to get to work. You are not just adding one more feature to your services but establishing an entire platform for your company to do business in. It is a big step and requires a whole new world of dedication. Like any e-commerce app, a real estate app orbits around its consumers. It exists for their satisfaction and gives them what they want in your agency through their phones. Therefore, now you are stepping into the next crucial step, and you need to consider what you are providing with this application and how it can fill the gap in the market. 

Choosing the Real Estate Mobile Application Type

The mobile application type should reflect your agency type to incorporate features and design elements that work best for the available services. For example, if your real estate agency leans more toward renting apartments and houses, you need specific features that show the renting cost and the criteria for renting. For this, you need to recognise the type of app to build based on your company. 

Types of mobile apps for real estate

Here are 8 common types of real estate mobile apps you might be inclined to use:

1. Buying/selling apps

If your agency focuses on directly buying and selling properties, you need an app that does just that. A user interface that provides favourable space to easily put up properties for sale and surf for interesting properties for the customers might do that job. The primary elements of your app revolve around making the buying and selling aspects comfortable for the audience. 

2. Renting mobile apps

As the name suggests, renting mobile apps helps customers looking to rent apartments or houses in a certain area. Thus, that is what the app you are building should give them if that is where your company specialises at. Specific elements like rent description, landowner details, criteria for renting it, and many more can be highlighted when you showcase a property to rent in your application. 

3. Property management systems (PMS)

Property management system apps are designed to systematically perform all the processes between a buyer and a realtor digitally. From evaluating the buyer’s needs for a property through their personalised selection options to connecting the buyers to the realtor, the property, and the legal processes. PMS through an app makes the entire procedure much more efficient and inexpensive, and these apps are perfect for traditional real estate agencies working to transition digitally. 

4. Vacation and rental management apps

If your company is more inclined towards working with vacation and rental properties, management apps for such might be an ideal app to build. The features of the applications can circle around connecting a buyer to an ideal vacation or a rental place by giving them multiple options to scroll through. As a management app, just like PMS, it can act as a platform to perform all the necessary processes digitally. 

5. CRM apps for real estate

CRM refers to customer relationship management and is defined as the management of the communication between realtors and customers. CRM apps highlight the features for the two sides to directly communicate via emails, texts, phone calls, and easy follow-up tools. Such apps can do wonders for building an active and communicative online platform with many customers. 

6. Home evaluation tools 

Real estate apps specialising in home evaluation tools can benefit all real estate agencies. Home evaluation tools are the tools in real estate that evaluate and present the state of a property, from the condition, furniture, interior designs, and additional interior elements to the property’s location and the neighbourhood’s nature. Having this feature in your app will further enhance your customer experience by giving them a better understanding of their options. 

7. Investment apps

If the target audience of your agency is investors, building an investment real estate app can be a good option. It can be designed to filter out the best options for properties based on your customer’s requirements, along with performing all the operational tasks that go into investing in a property. This type of app is also designed to handle routine property management procedures.

8. Construction apps

If your agency leans more towards undergoing construction for your clients while handling properties, then these apps work best. You will have the freedom to add tailored features that cater to your customer’s requirements to fill everything they need to know and follow when it comes to the construction or renovation of properties. 

Selecting Features for your Real Estate Mobile App

By designing an app for your agency, you will have the creative freedom to include all the features you feel is necessary based on your experience in the physical market and favourable additions in the digital real estate market. Customer experience should be the first medium in adding, removing, or upgrading those features to make an ideal application interface that is preferred by all. 

Here are some primary features you can consider adding to your real estate mobile app: 

1. User Onboarding 

User Onboarding includes signup and login features where customers can easily sign up to your app and scroll through the properties. They can also sign out or log out and log in whenever needed. 

2. User Profiles

Creating separate individual profiles that play different roles can be extremely useful for a direct service-providing industry such as real estate. For example, one can sign up as a buyer, seller, or agent, and the app will be tailored to their roles and filter out the content necessary for them. 

3. Listings and Database 

This is a primary feature where the users can manage and keep track of their properties or the properties they are selling or are interested in. In addition, sellers can easily update properties and keep a record of their progress with the help of their personal database.

4. Filters and Categories

Apps can do wonders in categorising and filtering out property options compared to traditional markets, where this is extremely time-consuming. Users can look for the category of their choice and filter out specific needs they are looking for in a property in a matter of seconds in your real estate app. 

5. Property Profiles

A platform to easily make property profiles makes the online real estate market a game changer. Every property you deal with can have a separate profile listing all its features and pictures that a potential buyer can easily reach through the app. 

6. Favourites

After scrolling through tens and hundreds of properties, buyers can easily shortlist their favourites and mark them to get back to them later in the app. This makes the whole process of house surfing much more efficient. 

7. Maps 

Maps are another wonderful feature that the audience highly demands and appreciates. Any property can be tracked down using maps making the entire process of understanding the area and even visiting it much easier and, most importantly, saving time and effort. 

8. Push Notifications 

With your app, you can easily send push notifications on your user’s phone regarding exciting offers, suggestions of their preferred property, updates on a property they were looking at, and messages from realtors they are dealing with. 

9. Property Cost Calculation

Having the option to estimate and calculate the cost of a property through your real estate app is another feature customers will appreciate. This helps them shortlist potential properties in the comfort of their phones. Needless to say, it makes the job for realtors much easier. 

10. Calendar 

Imagine having the convenience of appointments, reminders, and dates for the best market price on the other side of a feature in an app. This can be another great addition and help increase communication and connections with buyers and sellers, making looking into a property much more organised and accessible. 

11. Direct messaging or a phone call

With the help of direct messaging and phone calls features in your real estate mobile app, buyers can easily connect with sellers, realtors, and the agency in general regarding a property they find interesting. 

12. Virtual Tour 

Having the option to virtually tour a property with the help of virtual staging, or even videos and photos, can amplify a customer’s digital experience with a property they find in your app. This highly suggested feature will take your app to the next level. 

13. Analytics 

Effortlessly being able to examine the market status, market price, and analytics of a property a customer is interested in or is considering buying in the future. For example, analytics can be put in a subsection of your app and are a great addition to upscale digital features that wouldn’t have been so easily possible in the physical market. 

What is the Price of Building a Real Estate App? 

Building a real estate application for an agency can cover a wide spectrum of price ranges based on the type of app you have decided to make. This is also dependent on the features that work best for your agency and caters to the needs of your target audience. It can also differ from company to company or developer to developer. On average, the price of building a real estate property can start from at least $8000 to as much as $65,000, based on the application. 

Benefits of Building Real Estates App

By now, it is evident that real estate app development for your agency can be incredibly beneficial for your company. Here are some key features of building a real estate app:

  1. You’ll be able to broaden your services to customers limited to physical accessibility. 
  2. More options for customers to surf through.
  3. Options to shortlist and filter out properties they are interested in and search specifically for what they need in a property without having to explore properties physically.
  4. There is no limit to the number of properties you can put on the market. 
  5. A convenient platform to showcase the virtual staging of properties.
  6. Build a digital online presence for your company that can be easily accessible to potential buyers through their mobile phones. 
  7. Reduce the expenses of in-person marketing and minimise the costs of different procedures for realtors by making it doable online through the app. 
  8. Option to observe the real estate market and find the best time to purchase properties.

Develop your real estate app with Wolfmatrix

Wolfmatrix is an app development company that works to build web and mobile applications for all Android, IOS, and hybrid systems. We are a group of remote software engineers working to provide different website and app development services. We offer you an ideal platform to work for your real estate app with our research-based development process and the use of best and standard app development practices based on your agency. In addition, we have an immense reputation for building good user interfaces for marketing applications to enhance their traffic and sales further.

Conclusion

Whether your real estate company has been leading the market for years or you are on the way to guiding your company to the top of the industry, modern-day customers demand an online presence. Having an application to undergo all the aspects of digital marketing while enhancing your products, services, and features can play up your game in the industry. It is essential for today’s mainstream and local real estate agencies to connect with customers by standing just one click away on their phones. Real estate apps are the future of the industry.

FAQs on building a real estate app

How much does it cost to build a real estate app?

The cost of building a real estate app ranges from $8000 to $65,000 in the market. 

How to hire real estate mobile app developers?

You can contact Wolfmatrix via online form or email.

How do real estate mobile apps make money?

Real estate apps can make money through the application by placing third-party advertisements. In the long run, apps help bring wonder traffic, increasing sales. 

How can I earn from my real estate app?

If you have a property to be sold, you can make a seller’s account in your real estate app and put out your properties, adding its features. 

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