Challenges in Real Estate Mobile App Development

Digitizing the real estate field has undergone a significant shift over the last few years. Today, around 97% of potential buyers utilize the internet during their home search.  Moreover, the number of buyers using mobile applications for this purpose continues to grow. This trend has made it a strategic decision for agencies and brokers to develop a high-quality, low-cost real estate app. However, the real estate app development, also faces a list of challenges, which you need to be aware of. This post will help you avoid them with complete awareness. 

Key Challenges You May Face During Real Estate App Development

Creating a reliable and scalable property app means managing several different parts, from selecting the right people to ensuring that data from multiple locations is accurate. Each of these decisions can directly impact the long-term success of your company. Therefore, companies interested in real estate app development must identify these potential challenges and account for them early in the development process.

• Choosing a Development Agency

Choosing the correct development agency is one of your greatest challenges. Many agencies claim to have experience with real estate, but actually do not. If an inexperienced agency underestimates the difficulty and complexity of designing a backend system providing the necessary level of security, then reliability and scalability will never be achieved.

• Validating App Data

Listing a property accurately, with valid data and legally compliant, is necessary no matter how much challenging it seems.  Since having inconsistent data is detrimental to a user's trust in using the application, the lack of proper data can dilute the credibility of the company's position in the market. Validating that this function works correctly is vital in the real estate app development.

• Platform Decisions

Making a decision between using a Native iOS/Android application vs Cross platform framework will affect the price, speed, and performance of the application. Using a Native application instead of a cross-platform application will be less expensive to build. But cross-platform applications will provide less performance if you do not customize them properly.

• Deciding on the Screens

The user interface of a property application is strategically important due to the fact that too many features will overwhelm the user. On the other hand, too few will not provide the user with enough information to feel interested in the property. Advanced filtering, property comparison tools, mortgage calculators, and saved searches should be presented as intuitively as possible to improve user experience.

• Finding the Right Time to Launch

Timing matters in any market. Launching a new real estate application during peak buying seasons will yield quicker adoption. Whereas, launching the application during the off-peak seasons will hinder the speed of customer attrition. Doing competitive research along with forecasting demand on a regional level should be done prior to launching the application publicly.

• Marketing and Promoting The App.

Technological advantages or having great functionality alone will not help market your app unless you take a step forward. It is critical to use available marketing techniques such as App Store Optimization (ASO), paid advertising campaigns, and working with local brokers or agents to increase an application's visibility.

How to Deal With These Challenges 

The company must address all of these issues through the effective execution of a well-thought-out plan. Your real estate app development must focus on the necessary technical skills to achieve a scalable solution. A proper development plan will incorporate solid marketing plans and the use of qualified technical support. You can overcome the development challenges through the following measures; 

• Hire Programmers Experienced in the Real Estate Tech Space

You require digital developers who have dealt with MLS integration, mapping APIs, location-based filtering, and huge amounts of property data. If you don't hire experienced real estate tech developers, you will likely spend months fixing mistakes that could have been avoided.

• Automate Your Data Checks From Day One

The price of properties can change, homes can be sold, and details about properties can change. If your back-end system is not automated to validate and sync automatically, there is a good chance your users will lose confidence in your platform very quickly.

• Design Your App for Scalability, Not Just for Launch Day

Selecting a cloud service like AWS or Azure will help ensure that your app doesn't crash when there is a sudden increase in demand for your app. Therefore, scalability is an absolute requirement during real estate app development.

• Take the User Experience Seriously

Buyers don't have the patience to use a cluttered user interface. You should conduct usability testing and observe how real people search for homes to see if there are any areas in the navigation that could be made easier with a clean filtering system.

• Start Marketing While You are Developing Your App

Consider ASO, SEO, local partnerships, and paid advertisements as you create your marketing plan. Do not wait until you are finished developing your app to start planning for your visibility.

Conclusion 

Real estate app development has immense growth potential if you know the ways to overcome its viable challenges. So, measure these challenges and make plans to resolve them with your trusted developer company before starting the process.