How Much Does It Cost To Create A Real Estate App

Create A Real Estate App: Its Cost, Features, Tech Stack and Trends

dribbble by Nicolas Solerieu and dribbble by Dmitry Lauretsky

Whether it’s buying residential or commercial property, prices are soaring in 2021, and finding the right choice of accommodation under the budget has become a real struggle for people.

But those were the days of the past when people who wanted to buy or sell their property had to go through the traditional yet complicated procedures. In the wake of digitization and after a hit of the COVID-19 pandemic, real estate applications have become a buzzword of the industry. It has successfully replaced all those real estate agents and made the entire process to buy or sell property online much faster, transparent and convenient.

According to the survey, more than 60% of home buyers and sellers were comfortable with electronic document signing in 2020.

In addition, 79% of Americans expressed their interest in using 3D virtual home tours and digital floor plans, and 68% would prefer to take a video home tour with an agent instead of wasting their time viewing a property in person.

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People worldwide have started showing interest in installing real-estate applications on their devices like mobile, iPad, tablet, laptop or other.

Property information that was once only accessible through real estate agents or brokers can be easily accessed through search engines and real estate mobile apps.

90% of real estate companies have their website with property listings under different categories, and 97% of buyers use the internet to search properties. In that case, if you are still managing your real estate business with traditional brick and mortar style, then you are directly passing your clients to your competitors.

Since we are into the age where people would be glad to buy or sell everything with a few simple swipes or clicks on the mobile app, the real estate industry has no exception.

So whether you are a startup or a leading real estate entrepreneur, developing a mobile real-estate app like Zillow and Trulia has become an urgent need of the hour to succeed in 2021.

Why Should Startups Develop a Real Estate Mobile App Like Zillow or Trulia?

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While talking about building a mobile real-estate app, Zillow and Trulia are the pacesetters in the domain of real estate and housing properties. Though they are not dedicatedly to selling homes, but they have added enormous value to this domain by making the buying and selling process more accessible, more transparent, and insightful with their online services. With the adoption of the latest yet modern features to their app, they have truly changed the way real estate works.

Benefits of Building a Real Estate Mobile App Like Zillow and Trulia

Managing a real estate business is always an overwhelming task as there are several things to handle. But a real estate app development can be a perfect solution to all those hassles. All you need is to hire a mobile app developer to leverage these below listed benefits:

• Brand Recognition: The biggest perk of developing an excellent real-estate application helps increase brand visibility among visitors, agents and property buyers.
• Improves Communication: An app that provides a vast choice of property listings and excellent means of communication support will increase successful conversions.
• Simplified The Buying and Selling Process: A well-planned real estate application can make the entire buying and selling process a lot easier and quicker for the sellers and buyers. Especially when software development companies can customize things like advanced search filters, arranging calls, pricing, location of the property and other core functions according to the user’s needs.
• Customer Support: Users always appreciate 24*7 customer support on apps like Real Estate to get all the necessary information regarding the agent’s contact details, property location, property area and more. Implementing a chat-bot in a real estate app will help you provide seamless customer support to the users.

If you are serious about taking your real estate business to the next level, developing a mobile app is a perfect approach. All you need is to intake the emerging digital trends in your mobile app development.

What are the Biggest Digital Trends in the Real-Estate Industry?

Undoubtedly, the demand for real estate applications is surging every day, and mobile apps give you a powerful tool to market your services. However, how to get your app a competitive edge in the real estate market is one of the major concerns of businesses. Simply by keeping your app up with the latest trends in the real estate industry, you can easily sidestep your competitors.

• Using Artificial Intelligence (AI) Algorithm

Artificial Intelligence has become a big thing in determining customer’s behaviour and delivering an excellent user experience in these modern times. Using AI-powered tools in real-estate applications will be a worthy decision. It enables you to store user’s preferences, personalized in-app alerts and send targeted notifications to increase your conversion rate. The leading real-estate application-Trulia is also using the same technology to double its customer demand for its listings. To add this feature to your app, it is advised to hire an app development company with expertise in customizing the app with AI.

• 360 Virtual Home Tour

According to studies, once a buyer landed on the website, they would prefer to walk through virtual home tours. These home tours help homebuyers get a sense of making one of the most expensive purchases of their life. The 3D home feature was first used by Zillow in 2019 and has made real-estate purchases a seamless experience for the users.

• Using Big Data Technology

By implementing this technology in your real estate mobile app, you can allow users to compare properties with different perspectives and let them make the best decision. Big Data algorithms can provide you with accurate estimations of the other properties and allow users to access the property values based on the big data algorithms.

Now we have a look over how these emerging technologies empower the industry players and make them rule the real estate mobile app industry. Next, it is time to look at the real estate mobile app features that make your app work seamlessly.

What Features Are Contributing To The Success of a Real Estate Mobile App in 2021?

When you are planning to develop a top-rated real estate mobile application like Zillow or Trulia, you need to understand the secret behind the success of these applications. There are various factors such as brand image, app interface and many more that contribute to its success. But top of all, a customer-centric feature set is the best factor that engages customers and helps your app to become a big hit in the market.

So Let’s See The Must-Have Features and Cost Estimation of Real Estate App Development:

• Easy Login or Sign Up: This is the essential feature of your app, so make sure you have integrated multiple login procedures to make it easier for users to access the app. It means you can add the flexibility to access the login page by using the phone number, email address, social media account, Google accounts and more to ensure stress-free login and increase user retention rates. Also, make sure you have a two-way authentication process by sending a verification code on the user’s mobile to make your app more reliable and trustworthy.
• Database: Everything related to the app’s success or core functioning is majorly dependent upon integrating the database in your real estate mobile app development process. The more comprehensive and updated it is, the better would be the chance to keep your users interested in the app.
• Search and Filters: This is one of the essential features of your app. Once the user lands on the app’s home screen, property identification and filtration is the first thing that they probably perform on your app. You can hire mobile app developer to customize this feature and add as many as shortlisting features or filters to the platform. This will bring your end-users to a much bigger comfort zone regarding the reliability of your platform.
• Geo-Location/Map: To make your app function correctly, it is important to have a proper map integration to help users find a property in the preferred location. It is the only way to ensure that the property buyers can reach the right location at the right time. To make your app work seamlessly, you can also consider integrating an intelligent map feature in the application, which quickly helps discover places closely connected to schools, banks, hospitals, and more.
• Property Photos: A real estate app or property listing app is incomplete without posting high-resolution images of properties. Make sure sellers or property owners will use the least photoshopped pictures of the interior and exterior of the house or commercial spaces.
• Virtual Videos: It is another essential feature that you can’t risk skipping in your real estate app. Virtual videos of the buildings help businesses convert customers to potential leads. The best real estate mobile app developers offer you to create best-in-class real estate apps with advanced 3D property view features.
• Adding Property Details: Everyone wishes to buy a property with no dispute or obligation from the local authorities or neighbours. Leading real estate applications provide complete property details, including nearest spaces, schools, landmarks, amenities, and more. With these details, customers can pick the right property that matches their needs and culture.
• Multiple-Property Listing: Integration of multiple-property listing feature will allow customers to find a range of properties from various categories. Agencies can display various buildings or apartments under different types with world-class amenities that meet user’s needs.
• Push Notifications: The proper implementation of this feature can offer you too much growth, so it is worth considering AI to track customer behaviour and accordingly use targeted notifications. By incorporating the push notification feature in the app, you will keep the users updated with the message service and keep them updated with the new listings or any other offers.
• Calendars: The feature comes in handy, especially for the real estate agent side of the stakeholders, as it will help them keep track of the property buyer/seller meetings.
• Save Search and Favorite Listings: To retain users, they should be allowed to create a list of properties and searches that they can return to. It will also be helpful for agents to determine the interest of the users so they can offer similar options. The feature to return to their favourite listings should be easily accessible on the user’s profile.
• In-App Messaging: To communicate with the agents, agencies and homebuyers instantly, it is essential to have in-app messaging features. Not only are they able to text and email each other, but they can also even send files and attachments. In addition, you can ask your mobile app development company to implement voice and video calls as well to add multiple modes of communication.
• Rating and Review: Add the option to submit reviews or ratings to the app so that other users can build up their faith in this app.

These are the few essential features to build a real estate mobile app that would take 1600+ hours and may cost 35,000 to 40,000+ US dollars. But suppose you are eyeing up to build an app that can conquer the world and add a competitive edge to your business. In that case, you can scale up your budget to 50,000+ US Dollars and consider implementing these below mentioned advanced features.

Advanced Features To Build Real Estate Mobile Application

• Property Cost and Mortgage Calculators: Property buying and selling involve complicated calculations to figure out whether they can fit your budget or not. With in-build calculators, it becomes easier for users to understand the down payments, taxes, interest, while mortgages can include monthly payments, taxes, and insurance.
• Chatbot: With a chatbot integration and online chat, users can get instant answers to their queries. Frequently asked questions can be responded with automatic messages, and users will be able to learn more about the app’s functionalities without any hassle.
• Administrative panel: This feature can be extremely useful for agents, property managers and landlords as it will help each party monitor their revenue stream. With this feature, rental agencies can access credit reports from rental applications and see their tenant’s rental history.
• List of Trending Properties: This feature will help users to determine what buildings are in trend and which area is in high demand.
• Rewards and Loyalty Program: This is an optional feature but never fails to attract users’ attention and strengthens the bond with the app. Real estate companies can offer rewards on each purchase and allow customers to redeem their rewards when they need them.
• Quick Social Sharing: This feature allows users to share properties with their friends and other family members. Aside from promoting your brands or properties, social sharing features help businesses to generate revenue smartly.

These are the additional features that you can choose to implement to extend the functionality of your real estate app and make your users feel delighted to access your app.

Now the question is how to build a Real Estate App? If you are dreaming of having a real estate or property listing app like Zillow or Trulia, then you need to think about a tech stack that enables software development companies to build the power-pack backend and make your app run smoothly.

How To Develop A Successful Real Estate Application Like Zillow: Tech-Stack Supporting Behind

So you have finally decided to build a real estate app that works like Zillow or Trulia. Before you scroll down to determine how much it costs you in the end, it makes sense to have an idea about creating a real estate app with a powerful backend.

Here is the list of valuable tools that can be used during real estate application development:

• Preferable Programming Language: Java and Kotlin for Native Android, Swift or Objective C for Native iOS apps, and React Native or Flutter for cross-platform app development.
• Data Management: Real and CoreData for managing the list of saved properties in the app
• Amazon S3: For Cloud Storage
• Facebook SDK: For integrating Facebook sign-in option
• SimpleRets,iHomeFinder, Spark APIs: Normalizes MLS data flow
• Mapbox or Google Maps API: To build custom maps
• Google Places API: Provide users with details about the local area

If you are choosing to hire an app developer, then make sure you let your experts use these technologies to create a powerful back-end of your app and make it run on multiple platforms.

How Much Does It Cost To Build a Real Estate Mobile Application?

At this point, you must be curious to know how much real estate app development will cost you? But unfortunately, there is no defined answer to this question as multiple factors are influencing the cost. And without getting into the depth of these factors, it is complicated to fetch out the real-life app development estimations.

Some of the significant cost affecting factors are product complexity, the number of features and functionality, the size of your development cost, the platform you choose to launch your app, technologies you used for the app development, UI/UX design, and more are considered as the few typical cost affecting factors.

If you want to create a real estate app that operates above listed features and is built with the same technology stack as mentioned above, the app development cost will be USD 50,000+.

This basic range has been settled on after analyzing the above listed technology stack and features that we have shared above. Still, any modification in the above mentioned sets would bring a cost and time variation. Therefore it is always recommended, consulting the cross-platform app development companies would be a great start to evaluate the accurate project estimations.

Required Team To Build Real Estate Mobile App Like Zillow or Trulia

No matter how brilliant your app idea is, what features and functionalities you choose to implement and how advanced your mobile app technology is. The Success of your app will majorly depend upon the team of developers you hire and what level of expertise and skills they poured into your project.

So to build a full-fledged real-estate mobile app, you would require a team of experts holding relevant experience in the industry and have skills to transform this type of app idea into a business-growing product. Here you can take a look at the team of experts required to build a real estate mobile application:

• Project Manager
• Front-end Developer
• Back-end Developer
• Business Analyst
• UI/UX designer
• QA Professional

The cost to hire a dedicated team of app developers varies greatly depending on the region or location of the experts. In addition, their expertise in leading technologies, knowledge and capability to handle project complexity also matters.

In India, the hourly cost of app developers is starting from 15 to 20+ US dollars, whereas Europe is the most expensive location to employ app developers as their hourly cost ranges between 100 to 150+ US Dollars. So before you hire a mobile app developer, it is worth clarifying their hourly cost and what level of services they are offering you.

Conclusion

The real estate market is booming at a fast pace without showing any sign of downwards. With the real estate mobile app, agencies can sell, lease or rent residential or commercial buildings online. So if you are a real estate company and finally decided to build a real estate mobile app, you need to hire an app development company to fuel your online business growth. It promotes your brand, helps agencies directly communicate with potential customers, enhances the market reach, increases the retention rate, and more.

Hopefully, with this blog, you have an idea about the valuable features, technology and app development cost. But if you thoroughly prepare to become a part of this thriving industry and remain competitive, then contact us and drop a query below.

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