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![\"logo\"](\"https:\/\/djangostars.com\/blog\/wp-content\/themes\/ds-new-blog\/assets\/img\/ds-logo-white.svg\"){kind=logo}
\n \n\t\t\tMobile App Development Services\t\t\t
\n Get a fully functioning app your customers will love <\/p>\n <\/h3>\n\t\t
Main Problems in Your Market<\/h2>\n
Creating a real estate application is associated with many tasks and problems to be solved.<\/p>\n
Traditions are hard to break. In some industries, it\u2019s hard to introduce something new and disrupt something else that\u2019s been functioning for decades. For example, the financial and banking markets are slowly giving way to fintech, yet still some countries aren\u2019t ready for it. People are just used to the way things have always been.<\/p>\n
Another industry that struggles to accept innovation is real estate. For instance, in Germany, it\u2019s hard to find a well-functioning real estate platform that will satisfy the needs of both property owners and buyers. There are some popular websites (including Django websites<\/a>), but they don\u2019t work properly. Listings only work if they\u2019re posted by brokers. The service is free of charge for owners, but quite costly for buyers. Consequently, buyers lose money. So do owners, who could have sold their property at a higher price instead of paying a commission to somebody else.<\/p>\n Also, the existing platforms don\u2019t provide property valuations. Owners don\u2019t know how much their property actually costs, and have to accept the broker\u2019s price. In turn, brokers tend to suggest more customer-friendly prices so the properties will sell faster. This problem was elegantly solved by Scoperty<\/a> \u2013 a service that connects owners, buyers and realtors, and provides up-to-date valuations. To offer buyers a better view of the property, some companies now use 3D and VR. One of the leaders in this is Matterport, which offers \u201cimmersive\u201d real estate tours using photographs, videos, and 3D experiences.<\/p>\n What you may learn from this is that to make a difference, you need to find a pressing real estate problem, and solve it.<\/p>\n If you want to create a real estate app, it’s worth thinking about communication. Our life is connected to the web at every turn. And it\u2019s understandable, because digital processes make our lives easier. However, if you want to create a product that people will love, you need to know who your customers are and pay close attention to the customer journey. Users of real estate platforms usually can be lumped into three groups, and when offering real estate application development services, you need to create functions necessary for each of them.<\/p>\n Owners and realtors<\/b> should be able to create listings, fill out property information, upload images, manage offers, and schedule meetings and open houses. At the same time, buyers<\/b> should be able to filter and choose properties, get information on location and neighborhoods, add favorites, get alerts for their searches, and contact the owners.<\/p>\n The product team decides what the customer journeys for these roles should look like. Will the interface be different right after the user logs in? Or will the interfaces for both user types be similar, but with different functionality for each user type? For example, the \u201cproperty owner\u201d profile should provide functionality for uploading photos of the property and its description, while the \u201cbuyer\u201d profile may provide advanced search and additional filtering options for more relevant search results. It all depends on the user\u2019s role.<\/p>\n As a service provider, you have to find ways to efficiently communicate with your customers and let them communicate with each other. Be sure to provide access to all the platform\u2019s functionality across all channels, web and mobile, and customer support either online or over the phone, or both. Create a direct and secure communication channel inside the platform that allows buyers to contact owners or realtors.<\/p>\n Read Also: How to Create a Geolocation App Using React Native<\/a><\/p>\n Why is valuation important? Because when it comes to real estate, large amounts of money are involved, and buyers want to be sure the property is worth it. In other words, it\u2019s all about trust and transparency. Providing valuations for property shows your customers that you care about them and strive for being in step with real market prices. To get this done, you may integrate your product with third-party services that\u2019ll provide necessary information about property value on the market.<\/p>\n This way, buyers and owners get more precise estimates than those that might be given by realtors, as the way they get paid often depends on how fast they sell a house. And this is something to consider when you want to build a real estate app.<\/p>\n To make the choice easier for buyers, PriceHubble<\/a>, for example, uses criteria like street noise and shopping opportunities to value property. Scoperty<\/a>, in its turn, provides a visual that shows whether the property in question is in an expensive part of town or not. For instance, another client of ours, Moneypark<\/a>, which is the largest European mortgage advisory platform, also uses similar partner data for valuations.<\/p>\n The one thing you have to remember is that the market prices change regularly. If you\u2019ve chosen to integrate with the third-party service that provides you evaluations, you should find out how often they update prices. On the other hand, if you\u2019ve decided to go along with a self-developed algorithm, you should keep track of new data (find a reliable source for it) and keep the algorithm model relevant to real market prices.<\/p>\n This means that if a crisis like the one in 2008 is repeated, you\u2019ll be able to re-evaluate all the properties and update prices. This is just not possible without the latest information.<\/p>\n It might be a challenge at the start, but you need as much content on your platform as possible. To bring buyers to the platform, you need owners and their listings \u2013 and owners won\u2019t come if there are no buyers.<\/p>\n One of the challenges with content on a real estate platform is that users don\u2019t always provide recent information.<\/p>\n For instance, owners and realtors don\u2019t often update their property status or information. They can denote a status for their listing \u2013\u00a0 Open for offers<\/i>, or For Sale<\/i> (with a defined price) \u2013 but may forget to fill out all the information fields or upload enough images showing the property. For that reason, be sure to remind users to fill the listings properly or show a progress bar which will encourage users to put more information as it increases their chances to be sold.<\/p>\n Another great example of the importance of content is Moneypark. It\u2019s a mortgage<\/a> platform where users can choose property from offers presented and either a) choose a property on their own and ask for a mortgage, or b) provide criteria for what they want, and let the platform find matches.<\/p>\n In both cases, it\u2019s important to provide as much information as possible so the system can find the right property. In the first case, the more information about a property that a seller provides, the better the chances that it will catch the eye of a customer. In the second case, potential buyers should provide as much information as possible about their criteria and about themselves. This will make the property search easier, and the customer will get an answer concerning the mortgage faster. When you want to make a real estate app, you should think about security. Along with banking and financial applications, proptech platforms need solid security for privacy and customer data protection. For instance, when developing similar services, you might be interested to host it in the cloud, like AWS, because they provide everything what you need – starting from encrypted easy-to-scale RDS instances in Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) to user authentication services like Cognito which handles sign-up, sign-in, email and phone verification almost out of the box. But even perfect tooling might be badly configured, especially a tremendous AWS cloud stack. That\u2019s why you have to ensure that the responsible person who sets up your infrastructure really knows how to deal with it. As there\u2019s no need to remind you that in terms of data security the stakes are very high.<\/p>\n Ever since the EU introduced the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the game rules have changed. It has affected not just EU-based businesses, but businesses around the world. The GDPR applies to anyone who offers a service or a product to an EU-resident and plans to collect and use or share their personal information<\/b>.<\/p>\n On one hand, the GDPR is a guarantee that platforms won\u2019t be able to share or store user information without the user\u2019s consent. Everything that can identify a person (e.g., name, email, phone number, etc.) is protected under GDPR. Users can edit or erase their information, whereas previously businesses were allowed to simply stop communicating with customers while keeping their data.<\/p>\n On the other hand, all this causes companies to make some extra moves concerning data processing and storage. For a real estate company, a data audit may be necessary to determine the legal or business rationale for collecting and storing data from buyers, owners, and realtors.<\/p>\n Obviously, for a real estate platform, a map is a crucial element. This is the first thing any user sees \u2013 whether they\u2019re an owner, a buyer, or a realtor. I can\u2019t stress enough how important it is to carefully choose a map based on the price and on available tools and features, especially when you have a large number of users.<\/p>\n For instance, for real estate app development, you may use Google Maps as it has a great satellite view. But there are few drawbacks you should know before starting to work with them.<\/p>\n First, their API isn\u2019t compatible with libraries that can work with any map. Which is why, if you don\u2019t like the pricing or the map itself, you can\u2019t just go and replace it with little effort and no changes to the application itself. Which isn\u2019t really convenient.<\/p>\n Another drawback can be that, due to Google Maps\u2019 use policy, it\u2019s not permitted to use any other geographical services (like finding coordinates using an address). Also, using Google Maps features is costlier than it is with others and can increase the cost of real estate app development. Thus, you may go for Google Maps if the satellite view is of a high priority for your product, but if it\u2019s not, there are also numerous alternatives you can choose from and save on the cost of mobile app<\/a> development.<\/p>\n In addition to the already mentioned, the proptech app may require comprehensive property listings (with parameter filtering), property management features, virtual property tours, mortgage calculators, and communication tools. This functionality can help streamline property transactions for buyers, sellers, and agents.<\/p>\n Incorporating analytics tools such as market trends and property value estimates can provide valuable insights to users.<\/p>\n Integration with other services, social media, email, and calendars, can also make it easier for users to manage their property transactions.<\/p>\n At some point, any startup should be ready to scale. This means it needs to prepare for both changes in technology and in business. Here are some general recommendations from my experience, which might be helpful for the development of any product not necessarily related to real estate.<\/p>\n Don\u2019t be afraid to get help from external services<\/i> that can solve your problems. You can integrate with a CRM tool for your back-office, or use authentication and authorization services, business analytics, a chat, or anything else you can think of.<\/p>\n Having third-party services handle recurrent everyday tasks for you will win you some time, help you focus on the unique and authentic features of your product, and allow you to work on what really brings value to the market. This will also help you understand your product and your needs better, and, consequently, develop your own solution, or migrate to another service provider.<\/p>\n At the implementation level, make sure that there\u2019s a certain interface that allows for easy changes to the client code that communicates with the external service. Note that some services have a vendor lock, which means you won\u2019t be able to switch the services that are integrated with your app.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The authentication and authorization service AWS Cognito, for instance, is one of those services. It doesn\u2019t support exporting user functionality via UI. You can still export it via aws-cli, but not the user password hashes. This means that if you decide to migrate from Cognito, you\u2019ll have to move all existing user data to a new service or database and ask them to set up new passwords. Otherwise, clients won\u2019t be able to log in anymore.<\/p>\n Before committing to an outsourcing real estate app development, review your financial capabilities. You don\u2019t want your tech-stack bill to destroy your future business plans. Dip your toes into the market. There are services (for instance, authentication and authorization) that are convenient to use, when you don\u2019t have many customers. They provide email\/phone verification and reset password functionality out of the box\u00a0 \u2013 you can simply pick any of them and use their cheapest plan<\/i>. But when your audience starts growing, this might put you in a tight spot.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve already mentioned issues that may arise with Google Maps. To get into more detail, they significantly increased service prices since July 16, 2018. With about one thousand user sessions per day, the bill would reach approximately $1500 per month (the exact amount depends on which API you use the most \u2013 Places API, Geocoding API, or Map API). If you\u2019re aiming at a minimum of 10,000 users per day, you have to be ready to pay about $15,000 per month.<\/p>\n You can save cost of web application development<\/a> by caching requests or combining different geo\/map providers, but be sure to check their terms of use and legal limitations before you do. It\u2019s worth mentioning one more time: Google Maps doesn’t allow that.<\/p>\n Imagine waking up one morning to discover that a prominent media outlet has written about your product. This might spark public interest in your app, and this is the chance you can\u2019t miss. A good publication or a mention can cause a big spike in app usage, and it would be a pity if your product fails to handle all the requests<\/i>.<\/p>\n To prepare yourself for a big workload, you\u2019ll need to take a short break from feature delivery and have your tech gurus from a real estate app development company focus on product reliability. For a load test, you can use a wonderful tool called Locust<\/a>. Depending on the results you get, there are several ways to go:<\/p>\n Caching for maps.<\/b> If you\u2019re returning data that dependent on the user\u2019s viewport boundaries, consider passing \u201cslippy map tilenames<\/a>\u201d. These are defined rectangles for each zoom level, versus unique coordinates of a user’s screen position. In the first case, the URL to obtain data would be the same for multiple users who observe the same region on the map. This allows you to leverage HTTP caching. However, these users may have additional filtering parameters which may be unique. But it would also make sense to generalize them. For instance, if a user filters properties by price or size, you can replace text input with a slider. Thus, instead of typing in their own prices or floor space, users will select ranges with predefined \u2018steps\u2019, which are easier to cache.<\/p>\n When designing every new feature, real estate app developers should consider one thing: functionality has to be decoupled<\/i>. <\/b>Put another way, there should be boundaries between components. Why is this important? Later on, when you scale, you most probably will want to split a monolithic system. With boundaries, this will be easier to do.<\/p>\n On top of this, the codebase will be easier to maintain. Often, people stop working on legacy systems because they cannot be incrementally refactored. They decide to build a new app from scratch, which is actually bad for business, because a lot of money is spent only to get the same features they already have.<\/i> Also, it means no new features can be developed before a new app is ready.<\/p>\n Last but not least, make sure the team understands the importance of the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop. I\u2019ve seen talented engineers who were passionate about coding and perfect architecture, but a lack of such understanding might hurt your project’s success. To get into the right mindset, I highly recommend reading The Lean Startup<\/a> by Eric Ries. I\u2019m sure the book will help to look at the product from another point of view and find the proper balance between speed and quality. Startups are not about coding and technologies. It\u2019s about putting business goals first.<\/p>\n \u201cDesign is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works,\u201d said Steve Jobs. Of course, in this day and age, visual content has to be more compelling than ever. If users don\u2019t like what they see in the first seconds, they will just ignore whatever good content they\u2019re offered. But the real estate app design, the way it functions, makes all the difference. If users can\u2019t figure out how to use your product, you won\u2019t be able to solve their problems. Some startups place a lot of value on mobile when building a real estate app, but it\u2019s only up to you. However, a mobile-first layout of the platform is a must. Those who look for good deals or properties in very particular locations will definitely want to use your app on the go, chasing their dream house or office as they travel or run errands.<\/p>\n In my opinion, the development of a mobile app for real estate app development isn\u2019t a priority, as it means you\u2019ll have twice as much developing to do and spend twice as much money on marketing. So, an app probably makes sense only when your platform already has a large audience<\/i>. The cost of developing a real estate app is not a fixed figure and can vary greatly, as many factors play a role here. They include the project’s scope and complexity, app features and level of customization, and the development team’s location and expertise. Either way, to get the most accurate numbers, it’s better to discuss with the development team that can provide a detailed cost estimate based on your specific project needs.<\/p>\n Wrapping up the guide, let\u2019s come back to one of the most important topics in business in general. As I\u2019ve said before, you have to stand out. The competition is high, as are the requirements and expectations both from the industry and from the customers. Which means, you have to deliver. To do so, you have to understand:<\/p>\n What I\u2019m talking about isn\u2019t even the USP \u2013 the unique selling proposition. It may be there, but it\u2019s more about how the USP is realized in the product, and how it\u2019s being presented to the customers. For instance, if you\u2019re offering commercial property for young creatives or society startups, a web version of, say, Internet Explorer isn\u2019t your priority. What you can do, though, is use a less conservative design, follow modern real estate website trends<\/a> and experiment, which a younger audience will definitely appreciate.<\/p>\n To conclude, let\u2019s look back at what we\u2019ve learned. Real estate is a highly traditional industry, but this shouldn\u2019t discourage you. If you correctly define the problems of the market and what potential customers really need, you can offer a product that people are going to use.<\/p>\n Here, the next step would be to learn more about your customers and the best communication channel to reach them. When you do that, fill your product with valuable and useful content, offer security that users can trust, and make sure your product has a clear and intuitive design. This way, you\u2019ll create a product that people will not only use, but love doing so.<\/p>\n Last, but not least, make sure you choose a technology that\u2019s easily scalable and maintained, so that you can keep doing the good work as the number of users grows. Have an idea? Let's discuss!<\/p>\n\n \n <\/p>
\n![\"scoperty-main\"](\"https:\/\/djangostars.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/scoperty-main.gif\")
\nAnother problem during real estate application development that both sides of a traditional property transaction encounter is the duration of the closing process. Shuffling paperwork back and forth can take weeks or even months. Private Exchange Australia (PEXA<\/a>), for instance, has solved this problem in an innovative way. They use the cloud to fast-track this process and complete financial settlements digitally. Their solution even allows for electronic signatures.<\/p>\nHow to Communicate with Your Customers<\/h2>\n
You\u2019ll Need More than Just Valuations<\/h2>\n
\n![\"pricehubble\"](\"https:\/\/djangostars.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/pricehubble.gif\")
\nShowing additional information like this is your chance to get closer to your target audience, which will appreciate it. This is what a customer-oriented approach looks like, and it\u2019s vital to any successful startup, real estate web and mobile app development in particular, and business in general.<\/p>\n\u0421ontent Is King<\/h2>\n
\n![\"scoperty2\"](\"https:\/\/djangostars.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/scoperty2.gif\")
<\/p>\nThink about Security<\/h2>\n
You Need a Map<\/h2>\n
Other Features<\/h2>\n
Scalable Technology<\/h2>\n
Learn to Use Third-Party Services<\/h3>\n
Calculate Expenses on Tech Stack Beforehand<\/h3>\n
Think about Bottlenecks<\/h3>\n
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![\"airbnb\"](\"https:\/\/djangostars.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/airbnb.gif\")
<\/p>\nConsider Decoupling<\/h3>\n
UX\/UI<\/h3>\n
\n![\"darpedia\"](\"https:\/\/djangostars.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/darpedia.png\")
\nIn real estate, bigger things are at stake. Buying property can be the decision of a lifetime for many people, which is why you have to make sure that your real estate app has a clear and intuitive interface and understandable texts<\/i>. Even users with little technical or financial knowledge should be able to find their way around it.<\/p>\n
\n![\"darpedia2\"](\"https:\/\/djangostars.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/darpedia2.png\")
<\/p>\nReal Estate App Development Cost<\/h2>\n
Stand Out in the Crowd<\/h2>\n
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