Broker-Owners: How Many of your Competitors have a Real Estate Mobile App Live in your Area?
Have you gone into the app stores via your mobile device to see what Real Estate mobile search apps are live in your area? Consumers are already doing this, they want an app that will make home buying easy.
Today out of curiosity I picked up my iPhone, went to my app store and typed in, “homes for sale in Philadelphia.” With Philadelphia being the fifth-largest city in the United States, having a population of about 1,526,006 as of the 2010 US Census, I was astonished that only two apps appeared from my search. One app of course was Philadelphia Real Estate Search, powered by Smarter Agent (who’s data comes directly from the MLS) and another app that was built by another real estate app company (but they get their data from Zillow, which we all know can be old and stale data).
Aside from my obvious preference for Smarter Agent mobile real estate apps, there still are only two apps for real estate search in the entire Philadelphia area. What a gold mine of an opportunity for any company looking to get ahead of their competitors. I then went onto the web, conducted the same real estate search and I had a total of 121,000,000 results.
App world “Homes for Sale in Philadelphia” search results: 2 Internet s
earch results: 121,000,000.
With these numbers in mind, I did a little research. According to a study conducted by Flurry, “The era of mobile computing, catalyzed by Apple and Google, is driving among the largest shifts in consumer behavior over the last forty years. Impressively, its rate of adoption is outpacing both the PC revolution of the 1980s and the Internet Boom of the 1990s.”
“On top of this massively growing iOS and Android device installed base, roughly 40 billion applications have already been downloaded from the App Store and Android Market. More than ever, consumers are splitting their time accessing services on the Internet from PCs versus doing so on mobile devices from apps.
Last summer, Flurry published a report detailing how the average smartphone user, for the first time ever, began spending more time in their mobile applications than they do browsing the web. Updating the analysis, Flurry finds the usage gap continues to widen.”
With consumers continuing to move towards mobile devices, combined with the current low real estate app presence in most of the major app stores, I’m thinking it might be a good idea to mark your territory in the mobile application world before the rest of the real estate industry figures out this not-so-little secret. Plus consumers need a local tool because we all know most home buyers usually live in the same county they are buying a home in.
Word to the wise, if you do decide to take the plunge into the real estate mobile app world, make sure you do it right. Do your research. Go with a company that can stand by their data, has the ability to handle all OS updates and is live on all platforms and devices. Smarter Agent can give you all of this and more. Go to Smarter Agent.com to learn what we have to offer.
Download our national app by texting SA to 87778 and experience the technology that we stand behind and deliver to you.
~ Sasha England, MLS Coordinator