This is a comprehensive guide on real estate app development, covering key features, tech stack, and challenges involved in the process.
Highlights:
- The global real estate market is becoming increasingly dependent on digital and mobile solutions.
- Real estate mobile app development helps streamline operations, improve client communication, and stay competitive.
- Custom real estate apps address specific challenges for buyers, sellers, and agents.
These days, if your real estate business doesn’t have a mobile app, you’re probably missing out. Why? Simple — people use apps for everything. To stay in the game, you have to embrace digital solutions. We know this firsthand from our experience creating real estate apps that bring value to both users and businesses alike.
Our project, Mulki, is one of the first mobile real estate apps in the MENA region. It completely changed the way local property management works, especially for mobile-first users. Then there’s Rentorr, designed to connect landlords and tenants for easier property management.
Here is how our clients summarized our collaboration on the Rentorr app:
“Mind Studios has put a lot of effort into the development of our project. They’ve been supportive, understanding, and swift at the same time. If the client has an idea, Mind Studios will be able to turn it into something great.”
Figure out how our tried and true real estate app development approach can help you build a competitive app your agents and clients want. Keep on reading or request a 45-minute free consultation to jump-start your real estate mobile app idea realization right now.
Why your real estate business needs a mobile app now
Take a look at statistics from the 2023 Home Buyers and Sellers Generational Report made by the National Association of Realtors Research Group:
What can these figures mean for you?
Being a real estate company, you probably have a website, a YouTube channel, and/or a social media business page to allow your clients to easily find you. If you don’t, you need one.
However, with a mobile app, you can triple the chances for your listings to be found by home buyers, double increase users’ loyalty to your brand, and help your agents be closer to clients. Thanks to a mobile app, you can also keep up with digital trends in the real estate industry and attract substantial investments.
For example, Fintor, a platform for investing in fractional property shares, launched its mobile-first platform on iOS and Android, raising $6.2 million in funding in October 2022. Who said your real estate mobile app couldn't be the same worthy asset if done well?
Now, let’s summarize what benefits you can expect from building your own real estate app.
Benefits of a real estate mobile app
To create a marketable real estate mobile app, you need to take into account your target users’ wants and needs. Usually, there are three types of users in the real estate business: buyers, sellers, and realtors. Each will get their own benefits from your custom real estate app.
As you see, while top real estate apps provide a wide range of functionality, they still target specific user needs. If you aim at building a successful real estate app, you need to figure out the needs of your agents, sellers, and home buyers.
Mind Studios’ recommendations: To make a real estate app deliver on your hopes, market research should be your first step. Preliminary market research can provide you with up-to-date, sometimes unexpected, insights about:
- the ability of a real estate mobile app to meet your income expectations
- market share you can count on
- the latest competitors’ updates and cost to entice competitors' clients
- real estate tech trends and innovations
- industry statistics and reports forecasting your ROI, and more
Only based on data from market research, competitor analysis, and user surveys, will you be able to make the right decisions on what features you need to include in your app to meet user needs and to differentiate your app from competitors.
For example, during our South African market research before developing the Rentorr rental platform, we found an interesting fact: to meet landlords’ needs and stay competitive, it was critical to equip the platform with a tenant verification system backed by bank APIs. So, we partnered with the South African bank to implement the credibility score for tenants. They had to upload their personal details, and then the bank verified their solvency. This way, landlords got an extra layer of security and assurance. You can read more about it in our case study.
Now, let’s move on to features.
Must-have features for your real estate app
When developing a real estate app, choosing the right real estate mobile app features is crucial to ensure a smooth user experience and address the needs of buyers, sellers, and agents.
But how would you know for sure which features you need? Here is a little tip from Dmytro Dobrytskyi, CEO of Mind Studios:
“Different goals demand different feature sets. For example, a real estate app for managing rental properties will require features such as automated rent collection and tenant screening, while an app targeting buyers may focus on advanced property search filters and virtual tours. It's crucial to tailor your app's functionality to meet your needs rather than create a one-size-fits-all solution.“
So, here is a list of basic functionality for your real estate app:
Registration |
This feature allows users to sign up via social media accounts, email addresses, Apple IDs, etc. Analyze what social media channels your target users prefer. According to the NAR, real estate agents, for instance, are most active on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram. |
User profiles |
Since you have three types of real estate app users, you need to create different profiles for each of them. Consider putting a buyer's profile at the end of your app's navigation bar. Most first-coming homebuyers will likely want to search for homes rather than fill out long forms. Meanwhile, it is sensible to offer agents the ability to create their profiles on the first onboarding screens. |
Extensive database |
If you’re a real estate agent, people in your region can hire you to assist them with selling their properties. Thus, you form your own database of homes for sale in your region. But if you don’t have your own database, or you want to expand the database you do have, you need to take data from third-party sources. For instance, getting listing data from Zillow will suit you if you’re an American or Canadian realtor. |
Filtered search |
Narrowing listings by price and location is nice, but if your objective is to make a Zillow clone, you need to extend the list of filters. Also, think about allowing users to store selected search filters. This way, you’ll be able to notify users of new listings that fit their criteria. |
Mapping |
In some apps, you can view property information by clicking on the map. Using the draw feature, you can circle an area on the map you’re interested in and get data about all properties within the boundary drawn. |
Property details |
Property details are the most important part of your real estate mobile app. They demonstrate to users what they seek:
|
Save to favorites |
To better understand what your users are searching for, you can offer them to save properties they like. Buying or renting a home isn’t a quick decision, which is why users will be thankful for the possibility to return to properties they like and view them again. |
Push notifications |
How can you make user interactions with your real estate mobile app more efficient? By sending targeted push notifications. To make them targeted, you need to know your users’ preferences. You can extract them from:
|
Calendar |
This feature is crucial for all your app users. Using an in-app calendar, buyers will be able to directly check available dates and schedule showings with agents or homeowners. The same important thing is a calendar for agents. They can effectively manage their showings in the app and get reminders at the appointed time. |
Ratings & Reviews |
Ratings and reviews from real people about the realtors' professionalism, the homes' condition, or neighbors' friendliness can be decisive for homebuyers in purchasing properties. Ratings and reviews can also help your agents enhance their authority as true experts. Positive ratings and reviews about properties can streamline the selling process for homeowners. So, allow all your app users to leave reviews and set ratings. |
In-app analytics |
This feature can be implemented in two ways: For your agents. Allow them to monitor their key performance indicators and look through reports displayed in visual-friendly in-app dashboards, graphics, and diagrams. For you as the mobile app owner. With an integrated admin panel, you’ll be able to keep your finger on the pulse of your real estate mobile app performance. You’ll know how much time an average app user stays on a specific app screen, what screens users quickly leave, and more. |
Mind Studios’ tip: By using a recommendation engine backed by machine learning and artificial intelligence technology, you can give personalized recommendations where you show users properties that are similar to their favorites or closest to their requirements.
Advanced real estate mobile app features to stay competitive
Don’t want to create a mediocre real estate app? To help you join the ranks of real estate mobile app leaders, we recommend you to add five advanced features for your post-MVP app versions.
Virtual home tours
If you want to make an outstanding app, you need to focus on maximum visualization for your property listings — that is, implementing 3D panoramic photos and 3D home tours.
Check out our design concept for 360-degree search in a real estate mobile app. A 3D panorama allows your users to examine the exterior of a property before visiting it.
Mind Studios’ insight: When you make your own real estate app, keep in mind that agents will simultaneously upload lots of property images. Let's say up to 20 images, each up to 20 MB in size. You should ensure your app works flawlessly while uploading photos and videos.
In-app calculators
Enable users to get current estimates of property cost and mortgage rates. For this, you can integrate calculators powered by machine learning and big data algorithms into your app.
Having a nationwide median error rate of 1.9% for on-market homes, Zestimate is a good example of an accurate property calculator.
For adding an in-app mortgage calculator, you can take an example from Redfin’s one. It displays user mortgage payments, including the principal and interest, homeowner's insurance, taxes, homeowner's association (HOA) fee, and private mortgage insurance (PMI).
Real-time messaging
One of the core missions of your real estate app is to provide the most convenient functionality for connecting homeowners, homebuyers, and agents. Based on users' preferences, you can implement one of the following tools or all of them to streamline communication:
- Callback request
- In-app chat
- Book a consultation
- Send an email
- Voice and/or video calls
For our Rentorr project, we improved the communication between landlords and tenants by implementing in-app messenger. This allowed landlords to communicate with tenants and contractors to address maintenance requests quickly.
Landlords could easily monitor maintenance jobs involving contractors, while tenants could reach both landlords and contractors when applying for maintenance work. This streamlined the whole property management process a lot and resulted in faster resolution and improved user satisfaction.
Augmented reality
If you want to capture the American market, you need to think differently and create something unique. For example, using augmented reality (AR) technology in your real estate app, you can enable users to virtually furnish homes in consultation with professional designers. In other words, you can enrich your real estate app with AR-backed functionality from an app like IKEA Place.
E-signing
Your real estate app needs to be secure. We’ve already discussed sign-up options via social media accounts, emails, and phone numbers but want to highlight the importance of providing two-factor authentication. Moreover, you can require users to scan their ID to mitigate the risks of scams. And with blockchain technology, you can double-increase your app protection and enable users to safely e-sign contracts and make e-payments.
Mind Studios’ step-by-step development process
At Mind Studios, we follow a tried-and-true development process that ensures the best outcomes. Our approach is designed to minimize risks, optimize resources, and create a real estate app that brings real value to users.
Discovery stage
At Mind Studios, we wholeheartedly believe that behind the scenes of every successful real estate mobile application development project lies tons of data-driven decisions based on preliminary conducted in-depth analysis of market trends, customers’ expectations, and competitors’ strengths.
We always start our real estate mobile application development with idea evaluation and business analysis. At this stage, we dive into your app idea and assess its viability in the real estate market. This is when we conduct market analysis, evaluating your business goals, and getting to know your target audience. We also identify key challenges in your niche and help you refine your app’s concept.
For example, when we started working on Mulki, we found out that the MENA region lacked a high-quality mobile solution for property management. Although the population was primarily mobile, there were very few mobile-first products in the market. So, this was a perfect opportunity for us.
It's also crucial for us to match our client’s business goals with the ability of their niche to cover these goals. To do this, first and foremost, we recommend providing unit economics calculations and making preliminary forecasts of the client's ROI.
Mind Studios’ insight: Apart from conducting market research, and competitor and target user analyses, you need to think of your unique selling point. What will set your real estate app apart from Zillow- and Trulia-like apps? What will make your users first use and then pay for your app? Once you define your unique selling point, think of the right monetization model — it should be chosen before the development. You can write all your considerations into a mobile app product requirements document and provide a well-defined project vision for the introduction meeting with your development team.
UX/UI design
Our design team works on creating an intuitive and user-friendly UX/UI design that will align perfectly with your brand identity. By conducting beta testing to analyzing the convenience of app screen interactions, we always try to find the most intuitive options for users. Look at some of our real estate mobile app designs on Dribble or Behance.
Development
We employ an iterative development approach, meaning we deliver core functionality step by step. This approach allows for both flexibility and regular feedback, as well as enables adjustments if needed. It also ensures your app's development stays on track while continuously evolving based on real-time feedback.
Mind Studios’ tip: We recommend starting your project with an MVP, as this is a perfect way to test the waters with core functionality and then, based on user feedback, add features that solve more users' pain points.
Testing
Testing is a mandatory stage for any project that ensures your project is bug-free, secure, and performs seamlessly. For this, we test your app across various devices, operating systems, and environments.
Support and maintenance
Even after the project is launched, our collaboration doesn’t end. We offer updates, bug fixes, and feature enhancement to ensure your real estate app stays competitive and relevant.
For example, after the successful launch of Mulki in 2022 and gathering users’ feedback on its functionality, we now are working on adding more advanced features for Premium users. So, if you aim at expanding your app’s functionality in the future, you can count on us.
Our tech stack we use for real estate application development
Here is a breakdown of the essential tech stack components our tech team uses while creating real estate apps:
Sign-in/sign-up |
To enable users to sign in and share via social media, you can use the Facebook SDK, LinkedIn SDK, and Google Sign-In. |
Listings and databases |
Follow the Internet Data Exchange (IDX) policy. IDX is a set of rules, standards, and technologies real estate players follow to track the way data moves from an MLS database to their website or mobile app. Then, integrate real estate APIs like the RESO Web API standard, SimplyRETS API, ATTOM Property API, or Mashvisor API to get adaptable data from MLS web portals. |
Advanced filtered search |
To provide your users with a wide range of filtering options, you’re likely to need:
|
Mapping |
Here, you should use third-party APIs:
|
3D virtual tours |
To create 3D home tours within your app, you can use a tool like EyeSpy360. |
Backend |
You should ensure that your app will work flawlessly while uploading photos and videos. Tools like AWS Lambda will help you host backend logic for your real estate app development project. Also, you need somewhere to store data on properties, users, and updates. For this, you can integrate mobile app databases like MySQL, PostgreSQL, or Redis. |
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Challenges in real estate app development
When you decide to make your own real estate app, you should keep in mind that there will likely be barriers that can roadblock you. We’ve prepared a rundown of possible challenges to arm you with efficient solutions.
Challenge #1: Too competitive market
Through all this article, we’ve highlighted that the real estate market teams up with the competition. That’s true. Each day, companies are vying for user attention by offering similar services, therefore creating a saturated market where standing out is becoming very difficult.
Mind Studios’ solution
What can help you beat the competition is focusing on your target user needs and how to meet them in the best way possible. With the help of an experienced team who commits the learn-build-iterate approach to the mobile app development process, you'll be able to polish your real estate app up to a world-known brand.
When we worked on Rentorr, we focused on user pain points by integrating tools that simplify rental applications, automated rental collection, and document management. This approach, when you focus on what your users need most, can help you become a brand with users' trust.
Challenge #2: High security requirements
When you build a real estate listing app, it implies storing a variety of sensitive information, including user profiles with financial information from banking accounts, as well as information about current transactions of your real estate agents.
Mind Studios’ solution
You need to ensure that your mobile app development team can maintain compliance with high-security requirements. Since we’ve already worked on a secure messaging app like Signal, we know how to prevent any unauthorized access to your users’ profiles.
For Mulki, we implemented SSL encryption, two-factor authentication, as well as cloud-based storage to safeguard user data and all transactions. Such features ensure that even the most sensitive financial and personal information is fully protected.
Challenge #3: Costly development
The more complex features your real estate mobile app development project will include, the higher the real estate app development cost will be. The current target audience’s preferences put you in a bind: to best serve them, you need to implement 3D virtual tours, property and mortgage calculators, keyless entry systems, etc., and those are costly to implement.
Mind Studios’ solution
In this case, you can appeal to the soft launch model instead of the hard launch or starting with a Minimal Viable Product (MVP). This is one of the ways to reduce real estate app development costs, but not the only one.
Contact our business development consultant to figure out other efficient ways to cut real estate mobile app development costs, yet get a high-quality end product.
Challenge #4: Lack of hard skills
You can’t build a real estate app if you lack specialized tech skills within your in-house team.
Mind Studios’ solution
If you can’t find such experts to hire locally, then you should consider outsourcing as it helps get the needed expertise from a wider talent pool — basically, from any part of the world. Both our work on Mulki and Rentorr demonstrated how having a dedicated team with the right expertise ensures that the app’s functionality works seamlessly.
Why outsource your real estate app development?
Now that you know some nuances of how to create a real estate app, the next step is deciding on the development method.
Here, there are two primary options: outsourcing or building your own in-house team. Both variants have their pros and cons, but here we will talk about why outsourcing is a go-to option for many.
- Cost-effectiveness. When you choose in-house development, it often involves overhead costs as you need to hire, train, and then retain developers, designers, project managers, and other team members. Outsourcing, on the other hand, allows you to tap into the expertise of a full team affordably. Plus, you only pay for the development services, not long-term salaries or benefits.
- Skilled team. When you outsource, you get full access to a team of experts with specialized skills. For example, at Mind Studios, we have years of experience in developing real estate apps like Rentorr or Mulki, meaning we understand the nuances of the real estate industry and its technology needs.
- Faster time-to-market. Outsourcing allows you to get your app developed and launched quite fast, as the outsourcing team has a well-established process in place, and you don't need to create anything from scratch. Besides, many companies, including ours, employ agile methodology, which means we deliver apps in iterations and make adjustments along the way.
- Ability to focus on core business operations. Outsourcing allows entrepreneurs to focus on actually running their real estate businesses. While the outsourced development team handles all the technical aspects of real estate app development, you can concentrate on the business growth, strategy, and client relationships.
- Flexibility and scalability. Outsourcing app development offers high flexibility. You can scale the project up and down based on your needs. Or you can start with MVP and expand your features later — a tried-and-tested method we often employ in our projects.
If you choose Mind Studios for outsourcing your real estate app development, you will not only get a reliable app development provider but a real partner who supports you the whole way, knows tech know-how, and delivers products that meet the needs and demands of your users. Contact us now, and we'll help you bring your real estate idea to life.
What’s next for real estate app development
The real estate industry evolves at a rapid speed. That’s why, to stay competitive, you have to stay ahead of the tech trends.
But what trends will shape the future of real estate development?
Artificial intelligence (AI) for smart recommendation
AI can fully transform how users or renters search for properties — instead of manual scrolling through endless listings, AI can learn users’ preferences (their ideal neighborhood, price range, or something else) and serve up homes that are their perfect match.
AI functionality doesn’t stop there. AI-powered chatbots can help handle customers' inquiries 24/7, making sure users get answers promptly without human intervention.
Big data for market insights
Big data analytics will allow real estate businesses to tap into market trends, buyer preferences, and property values.
If you integrate this real-time data into your apps, you will be able to offer valuable insights into property price trends, neighborhood demographics, crime rates, and more to users. Such insights can play a crucial role when people are making big decisions like where to rent or buy houses/apartments.
Just imagine a mapping feature with real-time data on local crimes or best schools nearby, and what’s best — users get it all in one place.
Voice search
Voice assistants like Siri and Alexa have already become household staples, so it won't be a surprise when they make their way to real estate apps. Using them, users can simply say what they are looking for — "Find me a 3-bedroom house downtown," for example — and the app will do the rest. It's not just fun, it makes property searches way more convenient and accessible.
Augmented Reality (AR) for virtual property tours
Why wait for an open house if you can tour properties from your couch? AR is making this possible with its immersive virtual home tours. Buyers can “walk” through properties in real time and check the layout or space without leaving their homes. This is a very useful option, especially for international buyers when there is no possibility for in-person visit.
Conclusion
Real estate mobile apps are highly convenient, and the demand for them will only increase. So will the competition. Despite the presence of well-known apps like Zillow and Trulia, people are still looking for alternatives.
So, how can you make a real estate app that will take its rightful place in this niche?
Find a trustworthy real estate mobile application development company, of course.
Also, keep in mind that your real estate mobile app design needs to be user-friendly. Apps like Zillow and Trulia are popular not only for their large property databases but for their simple and easy-to-use interfaces.
Balancing these app development requirements is no easy matter. But with the right development team, anything is possible. Want to see? Drop us a line.
