With people relying more on technology to access solutions of their problems, the real estate market is not one to be left behind. Two best real estate apps Trulia & Zillow have already covered the majority of American and Canadian real estate market and become the only choice of users by allowing them to find homes in an easy and effortless way.

In this blog, we are going to discuss everything about the Zillow app, including recent news which says that Zillow has made more than 40% of its revenue by flip-housing. We will also discuss things you should consider while going for real estate app development and the cost of it.

The Growing Need For Real Estate Apps Among House Hunters

Finding a new home in a new location has always been a struggle. It includes some tedious tasks such as finding broker online and end up paying a huge commission or requesting your friends to find you a new place. Even after this much of struggle, you turn up with nothing that suits your needs or meets your bare minimum requirements.
Here apps like Zillow and Trulia come to aid. They help people who want to rent out or sell residential or commercial properties and want to find a potential buyer or renter quickly. These apps are equipped with many groundbreaking features. For instance, it enables users to find the perfect property by applying different filters.

In recent time, our research team has witnessed many profitable opportunities in the real estate industry. Following graph clearly depicts that how rapidly the real estate tech industry has evolved in recent years. Thanks to this rapid expansion, many entrepreneurs have jumped in the market with robust apps. Zillow is one of them.

Get insight into Zillow – Real Estate & Rental App

Before we move into the other aspects of the real estate app, and how you need to work through one, here are a few points about the Zillow app that make it unique and distinctive.

The app has one feature specifically for the tenants, which helps them to find their apartments. They can make ideal and instance choice with the help of different parameters like Geolocation services, range, size, amenities etc.

There is a rental manager feature within the app, which allows you to list the property or buy the property. It also verifies your listing. You even get checked for the credit score and criminal record, which makes Zillow app more secure and reliable than its competitors.

For users planning to rent or buy a property, the most important consideration is the price of that property. Thus, Zillow has added an exclusive feature named Zestimate, allowing users to get an ideal estimate of the cost of the property they are planning to rent or buy.

The profitable business model of Zillow which you can also follow

Zillow follows a very conventional business model but with the twist. It sells its online space to the property management companies for the advertisement purpose. It then sends the qualified leads to the advertisers for further actions. These leads help both Zillow and property management company to earn a decent amount of money.

Zillow is also earning well from its premium service, that provides more online visibility to the agents. To be a premium agent on Zillow, agents need to pay a $10 monthly fee.

Zillow’s other major source of revenue is its house-flipping business. According to Buzzfeed News, Zillow has gotten into house-flipping business in a big way and earned about 41.5% of its revenue from it. House flipping business is basically buying the property and quickly reselling it for profit. During the last three months, ending June 30, the company sold more than 700 properties and purchased 1535 new properties. With that, they have made $599.6 million.

Must-have Features in your Zillow clone app or any other real estate app

After looking at the Zillow app and it’s business model, there are a few features that you can’t avoid having in your real estate app. We have shortlisted a few of them for your consideration.

Advanced search: The search is a fundamental feature of any real estate app. This feature allows users to look for properties based on their requirements. It is vitally important that you make this feature smooth and streamlined to meet the usage requirements. Advanced searches should offer niche requirements and should be an important part of the app.

Sorting: This feature allows the user to sort the available listings based on its popularity, newness etc. You have to introduce this feature into your Zillow clone app to make viewing the properties and adding one to the favourites easy for the users.

Image gallery: The listed properties should also carry images with it. This will allow the user to get an idea of how the property is looking, and what are the amenities property is having. You should ideally upload at least 10-15 pictures of the property.

Social sharing: This feature allows users to share the property details with someone who is looking for a similar property. Users can easily share it via messenger apps or other social media applications. This feature does not only earn you more users but it sells out properties more quickly.

Listing Format: The listing of all the available properties should be done in a format that is easy to view and compatible across the range of devices. The best format for the view is list format which is used by all top real estate apps across the globe.

Map view: Finding the location of the house listed on the app can be made easy with the map view of the location. The users can click on the map view and get directions to the concerned place. This will make their travel easy and effortless.

Saving the favourites: If users like a particular listing or are interested in a particular location, then they should be able to save it with ease. They can always go back to the saved listings and view if it is still relevant.

3D VR tours: With people appreciating comfort and convenience, you ought to prepare them for VR tours that will make the homes accessible while the people are seated at their offices or houses or any other country. It saves a lot of time and efforts, for both the agents and the users.

The mortgage calculator: When intending to buy a house, there are mortgage requirements that users need to fulfil. This calculator will give them an idea of the amount that they need to mortgage to buy the house or property they are interested in.

Digital documents: It is important for the real estate app to have a facility to sign digital documents. It saves a lot of time for both the parties involved. In fact, the users don’t need to go and visit the location in order to finalize the deal.

Camera for editing: Real estate managers or agents deal with floor plans every day. The smartphone camera allows them to click the floor plan pictures and edits it. They can add furnishing details and other things that users want in the floor plan.

Things to Consider While Developing Real estate App like Zillow or Zillow clone app

If you are planning to hire a real estate app development company to develop the Zillow clone app, there are few things which you can’t ignore.

The Purpose: Before you go ahead with the actual strategy to develop the Zillow clone app, you need to have a purpose defined for the real estate app.

1. Why do you believe your real estate business needs an app?
2. How will the app benefit the users?
3. Will your app add value to the life of your target audience?

If you can answer these questions, the next step for you is to proceed with the mobile app development process.

You need to plan the app before you can start the development. For this, you need to identify what your app ought to do, and how it will help the end-users? For instance, the Zillow app allows the rental markets to connect with those who want to get an apartment on rent.

The Zillow app is the perfect place for those planning to invest in the real estate market. It helps them to identify properties based on their needs. You need to identify this same path for your mobile app as well.

Define the target audience even before you start planning the app development process. It is important that you know for whom you are building the application. Is it for the real estate agents or for the real estate buyers/sellers or for both?

Consider the diversity of the market and the huge database that is readily available for you. There are several points within the database and several features that can be developed based on the database that you have identified. For instance, the properties can be listed based on the amenities, locations, routes, nearby places etc. Your database will carry all these data points when building the application. You may need to consider the ideal database technology such as PostGIS SQL database etc.

When developing your application, you may need to concern yourself with the various tech stacks that come into play. In order to integrate the maps feature, you probably want to use the MapKit API. Similarly, CoreLocation needs to be integrated in order to track the user’s location and to introduce other location-specific features.

CoreData or Realm helps with saving the favourites. Finally, social sign-in integration is a must for all the social integration that you want to introduce in your application.

So, as you now know about the Zillow app, its features, and how developing a real estate app like Zillow can make you millionaire, you must be wondering about the cost of app development. So, here it is.

How much does it cost to develop a real estate app or Zillow clone app?

Coruscate is the top real-estate app development company which entertains numerous amount of queries related to real estate app development. Our designers and developers work in the five simple steps to develop one of the most promising real estate apps. These steps are requirement check, planning an designing, front end development, back end development, testing and implementation.

With our rapid app development technique, we can develop your next-gen real estate app or Zillow clone app within 45-55 days and under $10k.

To know more about the real estate app features, market possibilities, business models and ask for a free demo of real estate app and consultation, contact our app scientist and business expert.

Note: We do not make clones of any exact application, clone means to us is how better we can execute your app idea with existing app features and experience.