Searching for a home on the go – how well are the new property apps doing?
When you upgrade your mobile phone technology as most people have done in the last couple of years, you take your web based property searching on the road with GPS real time mapping opening up a treasure trove of location based information to you. Apps are being developed and software available to enable you to look in greater depth at the physical location you are in at any point in time and have information including homes for sale filtered based on where you are. Google Places, Facebook check ins, Foursquare, instagram and a host of other available services allow you not only to recieve information but also to give information or feedback about where you are or what you are doing. These services are housed in the cyber ether or virtual cloud and can be collated to form a deep multifaceted impression or a person, place, or business. This technology is beginning to be harnessed by tech savy real estate agencies, salespeople, and real estate service providers such as realestate.co.nz and trademe.
Here is what realestate.co.nz says about their new property app:
The mobile revolution is in so many ways redefining the way we go about so many aspects of our lives. For the property market it is literally turning the process of finding your next home on its head.
I was sent an example of a property over the weekend where the level of viewing on the mobile app was significantly higher than for most properties, as can be seen from the chart below.
On most days in the past month over 1 in 4 of all views were from the mobile app (green colour at the top of each daily bar), as compared to maybe 1 in 10 of all views from a mobile for most properties on the market. This certainly reinforced to me the power of the mobile device as a discovery tool for property around you.
The drive to make this assertion is based on the fact that this property was listed over 6 weeks ago and on the web the property appears around the middle of page 2 of the search results – it is actually the 31st listings in sequence of properties in Frankton, Hamilton. This position in the search results usually leads to lower daily traffic as searching tends to be to the first page of search results and to recent listings, however as can be seen there was more viewing in the last 7 days on the mobile than on the web – why?
Very simply, the app is all about discovering property for sale around you and this property was obviously viewed by people in the neighbourhood looking for property to buy. That is why I say that the mobile app is turning property searching on its head. Whereas the web (much like the old newspaper classifieds) was all about top of page results, the mobile environment is all about context – what’s relevant to where I am right now.
As a point of note and to further validate this assertion I had a look at a couple of other similar properties on the market in the same suburb, the stats for their viewings are shown below:
Certainly looks like there are some very active users of the app seeking property to buy in the Frankton area of Hamilton at the moment – they can be easily seen walking the streets, smartphone in hand highly attentive to NZ’s favourite property app!
What Trademe is saying about their new app
The new Trade Me Property app will help you find your perfect home with minimum effort and maximum enjoyment using your iPad or iPhone. From the comfort of your couch or while you’re out and about, use this handy app to browse New Zealand’s largest collection of properties for sale and to rent – Trade Me Property.
Check property locations on the nifty map and save your favourite property searches so you can always see the latest properties that match your criteria. Use the watchlist to narrow down your picks, create open home appointments in your calendar so you don’t miss them, and share special properties with friends and family.
It’s all so easy and lots of fun! Best of all, there are more exciting features to come…
Trademe is partially blaming the rise of their success fees on the cost of developing these mobile apps. But as someone who has designed my own apps, there is no justification for a blanket rise in success fees based on mobile app development. They are raising fees because they can. Read article here
More reading:
http://www.voxy.co.nz/business/real-estate-app-hits-100000-downloads/5/132329
http://www.nziphone.com/news/site/apps-for-property-hunters-realestate-vs-trade-me.html
Download the Realestate.co.nz App here:
Download the Trademe Property app here:
I would love your comments. Do you have the iphone/android app of either company on your phone? How well does it fulfill it’s intended purpose of helping you find location specific properties for sale? Are there any other features they should be adding to the apps?
October 25 2012 12:30 pm | General Real Estate and Home Buyers
