Better Homes & Gardens Real Estate [Disclosure: They are a 1000watt Consulting client] released an iPhone app yesterday.
The brand, which is just over a year old, has a strong lifestyle vibe. From their perspective, real estate is more about living a life in a great place than simply buying or selling a house.
This app reflects that distinction.
First of all, this is a real estate application with no listings. It is not a home search app. Rather, it aims to help the user – presumably, here, a buyer – organize and simplify their home search.
Users can take photos from the app while house hunting, organize them, share them on Facebook, email them and rate their preferences. And while they are at it – there, out in the field – they can get information on schools, recent sales and demographics with a touch of the screen.
Does it need listings? That’s debatable. While one can think through use cases where a buyer would and would not be relying on the handset to both find the listing and capture and contextualize it, it seems to me the prudent choice is to keep it simple. The mobile platform forces these sorts of decisions, and that’s a good thing.
Like the Dunkin’ Donuts iPhone App, which makes the process of going on a coffee run easier, this is an application with a soft feel that is nonetheless built for getting something done.
I like that.
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[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Wendy Forsythe and Charlie Garcia, Brian Boero. Brian Boero said: Some thoughts on the new Better Homes and Gardens iPhone App http://bit.ly/2MISJ3 [...]
[...] Better Homes and Gardens takes real estate iPhone Apps beyond listings – See #4, but really, this app sounds really interesting and would love to see it in action, [...]
Seems like this app is geared correctly toward the niche buyer that BHGRE serves. Simply providing a unique, valuable tool like this will score points with these buyers, who I presume, are the type that don’t normally respond to the sales approaches facilitated by other apps and RE houses. I’m not calling it a home run yet, but I am interested to see the reception this gets.
Great start! A home search is about more than just listings, so it only makes sense to have an app that will give the client info on the area including schools, coffee shops, and even things like crime rates.
-Tyler
Thanks so much for all the feedback so far. We are working hard to try to bring something different to the buying experience, for the consumer. I put some background about the the approach taken when designing it, here on my blog post.
http://bit.ly/bUJGt
regards
Camilla
Congratulations to BH&G
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And they can use the Mark On Call(TM) 2.0 app to design and plan the use of their potential spaces in the process.