Savvy Real Estate Buyers Turn to Mobile
While the race to serve customers on mobile has been fierce in may areas, real estate seems to have been left behind, perhaps due to its recent economic bad rap. Although some applications, such as Trulia’s iPhone app are available for home buyers, compared to the number of sports sites, travel services, and useless iFart-esque downloadable apps–it pales.
Recently, we heard about a service called Smarter Agent that can be downloaded to a variety of smartphones and then uses location aware technology to display location-based listings with a variety of search criteria. This is a great tool for home shoppers who may be patrolling an area or school district and looking for homes to give the pass by. However, the question remains, ‘why aren’t top brokerages doing this themselves?’ Aren’t they leaving money on the table by not offering a mobile optimized view of listings on their web sites? How is it possible that they would allow a service like Smarter Agent to serve buyers in a better way than they can?
Ultimately, a better and more seamless view of real estate sites on mobile web would be a more unbiquitous solution. While Smater Agent offeres a lot of good features, it is still limited to those who
- Know about it
- Have a supported device
- have downloaded and properly installed the application
Smart money to recapture this market for major brokers like Century 21 would be to allow customers to simply access their web site via mobile web with ease and success–much like many airlines and hotels do today.