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Everything you Need to Know About Real Estate App Development- Types, MVP Features, and Tech Stack

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DhiWise

October 29, 2022
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DhiWise

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October 29, 2022
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Whether you are looking for accommodation or want to buy a property, it often seems too frustrating and time-consuming to hire real estate agents and search for properties.

Instead, most people today prefer real estate apps as a convenient way to search houses, apartments, land, rental and commercial properties on the go. Today approximately 97% of real estate searches are done online and 80% of them are searched using mobile apps. 

Increasing migrations, accommodation prices, and a volatile economy, all these factors are responsible for the growing demand for real estate applications. 

So, if you want to build an application for the highly competitive and demanding real estate market, then it's a must for you to know,

  1. What are the different types of real estate apps? 
  2. How to build an MVP  for a real estate application?
  3. What tech stack and development tools to choose?

Let’s go through all of them one by one.

Types of real estate apps

The ecosystem of the real estate industry combines everyone from the seller, renters, landlord, brokers, and buyers. Therefore an app developer needs to take a look around and find how the real estate app can solve different problems related to the parts of this ecosystem.

Based on the application service, they are classified into the following different types.

1. Rental Home/ Apartment search apps

This is the most common type of real estate search app that allows users to search from the property listing based on specific parameters like city, location, rent, neighborhood, etc. 

Example:  Zillow and Nomad.

2. Real estate agent apps

These apps empower real estate agents and brokers to provide their services to buyers. Most apps offer a 3D tour around the property and support for property documentation and other procedures while buying or selling the property.  

Example: Calendly and Quickbooks

3. Real estate investment apps 

These apps have a high demand among investors, and they have made the real estate market more accessible than ever. 

Example: Arrived Homes, CityVest

How to Build an MVP for the real estate application

The MVP (Minimum Viable Product) of an application has a minimum number of features that reflects the app's core functionality. 

With MVP businesses can launch an app early and modify it later according to market requirements gathered through feedback. Thus it also helps to save the time and cost of adding unnecessary features to the app. 

In the case of a real estate application for rental home/apartment search, there should be a good set of features that allows users to get desired accommodation at fair prices and owners to post their property (home/apartment) description and other details with ease.   

Here is the set of features that you must include in your real estate MVP app.

1. Advanced search engine with Filters 

The most important thing in the real estate application is the functionality to search and sort from the range of apartments and homes using filters such as city, location, property type, price, year of construction, etc.

2. User Registration 

With a personal user account, you can provide a personalized experience to the users while searching for homes and apartments. It allows users to save their searches, add to favorites, share information on social media accounts, and more such things. 

Also, the registration feature is easier to introduce than it seems, you can just provide the authentication through email id, contact, or a social media account. 

 

3. Contact option

Options for communication are the essential feature that enables users to contact the concerned person. So, there should be a chat and call option in the real estate app.

 

4. Integration with Google Map

People searching for a home or apartment often want to locate its place on Google Maps to get an idea of nearby localities, marketplaces, transportation facilities, and other things. You can add this feature easily with Google map integration.

 

5. Compare option

Choosing the desired accommodation from the huge list is a big challenge for users. Providing an option to compare them can make their life easier. 

 

6. Notification

The notification helps you to notify users about good deals, ready-to-move apartments, and other updates about real estate properties. 

 

7. Add and remove new property and update description for owners

Apps should have the functionality to add a property for the registered users, sellers, and agents. The owner profile has options such as proper listing, list of interested buyers, number of views, add a new property, update current one, add photos, location, and other details. 

Besides a front-end user app, you will require an admin panel to manage the listed properties and analyze the user reports. 

How to select the right tech stack for a real estate application?

Before choosing a tech stack for your application, try to get the answer to the following questions:

  1. Are you building a native or cross-platform app?
  2. Do you have cost and time limitations?
  3. What are your app scalability requirements?
  4. What is your project size- small, medium, or large scale?

Scalable and cross-platform app

For developing a scalable mobile application you can choose the technologies like Flutter, Kotlin, React Native,  or Swift. But if you are building a cross-platform application for Android and iOS users, and want to save your application development time Flutter and Kotlin are the best choice. 

Project size

For small and medium-sized projects you can use React Native or Flutter. However, if you are building a huge project Kotlin is the most cost-effective, safe, simple, and enterprise-ready technology.

Backend technologies

For building a backend you can choose from popular technologies such as Node.js, or PHP. And to integrate databases you can select anyone from the Firebase or Supabase.

Well, now you know everything about building a real estate application,  let’s find out how to build it within a minimum time and cost.

How can you build a real estate app efficiently at minimum cost?

The average cost of building a fully functional real estate application like Zillow can cost you between the US $80,000 to $1,00,000 on average. However, the cost may vary depending on app size, complexity, the technology used, UX/UI design, and the number of developers.

So, is there any way to reduce the app development cost?

Yes, DhiWise has an answer.

The intelligent programming platform can reduce your app development cost and time to a great extent by providing state-of-the-art features to speed up the development. Let’s take a look at a few of them.

1. Support popular technologies for app development

The platform supports front-end and back-end technologies such as Flutter, Kotlin (Android), React.js, Swift (iOS), Node.js, and Laravel. 

2. Design-to-code conversion

Its design-to-code functionality can convert your design in Figma, AdobeXD, and Sketch into the code you want in just a few steps. 

In case you don’t have your design ready,  DhiWise provides ready-to-use app templates and Screen Library for every business case. To build a real estate app you can use any one of the following UI Kit.

3. Interface for building custom UI

Its visual programming interface allows you to customize the application UI. You can set up actions, and navigation, change the view, add lifecycle methods, and more all the coding levels using the smart editor. 

4. Integrate API to screens

The platform makes API integration easy by allowing you to upload postman collections, or manually add APIs. Once the APIs are added they can be customized using the same platform. 

5. Integration with powerful tools

GitHub and GitLab are the most popular tools for developers which make code sharing, collaboration, and deployment easier. DhiWise integration with these tools promotes team development. 

6. Integration with Firebase and Supabase

The platform also comes with Firebase and Supabase integration that lets you connect your application with structured and unstructured data in a few clicks. 

7. Clean code generation and complete code ownership

The platform generates clean code which is easy to scale and maintain. Moreover, it gives complete code ownership for the generated code so you can customize your app in the way you want. 

Summing Up:

Well, now you are all set to build the real estate application. If you are unsure about what your target users expect from your app, it is good to launch the MVP first and DhiWise is here to help your developers get your app faster to the market.

Sign up with DhiWise today to start building your real estate app!