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REALTOR.com Real Estate Search – iPad App Review

By | April 29, 2011 | 2 comments
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The REALTOR.com Real Estate Search is a very handy utility for anybody looking to buy or rent a new home.  With access to the REALTOR.com database, you have the most complete database of available listings at your fingertips with over 80 percent of available listings are included and updated every 15 minutes.

The recently released version of this app boasts a number of new features, including a newly redesigned home screen allowing for at-a-glance reviews of your recent searches, nearby homes for sale, open houses, homes for rent and value added features like an area scouter allowing you to view the average price and square footage for homes in the area.

Searching for a property is very simple and can be done in a variety of ways, whether you prefer to draw a location on a map, browse cities or using your current GPS position.  When using nearby areas you also have the ability to broaden your radius, giving you nearly endless possibilities for choosing a home in your desired neighborhood.  Once you choose a location, it is quite simple to customize your search by the price, number of bedrooms, bathrooms, home size, lot size, even the age of the home.

Viewing a listing is quite comprehensive.  Not only do you get the basic details such as location, price and square footage, you can also view photos, give it your own personal rating (and make notes), send it by email, share on Twitter or Facebook and review all of the interior and exterior features.  Finally, you are able to use this view to contact the agent selling the home if you would like to arrange to view the property.

What I liked: The variety of search options available make this a very powerful app.  My favorite feature is when creating your search you can preview the search result count so you know whether to continue adding criteria to limit the number of results (or remove criteria if very few results would be returned).  I loved that it could use my GPS location to customize my search by location because I don’t know how many times I’ve been driving through a neighborhood and thought it looked like a lovely place to live –but not had any idea what it was called or where the boundaries might be.

What I didn’t like: It was difficult to find things about this app I wasn’t fond of.  There is support for finding rental homes in addition to those available for purchase and the database of available properties does seem to be somewhat limited –but that is not the direct fault of the app as it can only pull data for what has been added.  It may also be nice to have a tutorial added, because the number of features available are hard to take advantage of because you don’t know they exist.

To buy or not to buy: It is difficult to go wrong when the price of admission is free, but even at a small price this app would be recommended because of how handy it is.

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About Jillian: A professional. A geek. Writer. Music fanatic. Creative. Thoughtful. Programmer. Educated. Outgoing. Thrill seeker. Realistic. Optimist. Clever. Sarcastic. Not typical. Contact me on Twitter: @codeGoddess

  • http://thoughtfaucet.com/blog/?utm_source=discus&utm_medium=profile&utm_content=comments-gahlord&utm_campaign=socialmedia Gahlord Dewald

    I did an interview with the president of Realtor.com were we talked about some of the thinking that went into making this app. Audio and transcript are here: http://thoughtfaucet.com/strategy/decision/data-app-design-and-making-mobile-stuff-a-conversation/

  • Anonymous

    Jillian, thanks so much for your review, and Gahlord, thanks for posting your piece! There are a lot of really fun tools on this app–if you’re thinking about going house hunting this weekend, you’ll love the open house feature, which brings up all the open houses in your area; http://youtu.be/TTEfsessj1I

    Happy house hunting!