5 best apps for buying a house
Are you looking to move? Maybe you want to get a home that’s closer to work, closer to your kid’s school, maybe to a gated community. Whatever your reason is, finding a new home is not difficult.
The traditional way of looking for a home in the past was to look through newspapers in the classified section to see if anyone had a home for sale. You could also visit a real estate agent’s office, or maybe walk into an open house to check out the home for yourself.
If you don’t have time for these things, thankfully technology has gotten advanced enough to the point where we can look for new homes on our smartphones with apps. If you’re trying to find some real estate apps for your next home, then here are some of our recommendations..
Zillow
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPEx81fjZic
It’s hard not to think of real estate and not think of Zillow. The company has been on the property scene for quite a while now so if you’re already familiar with their website and services, the company also has apps for iOS and Android that pretty much offer up the same features.
You can look for homes to buy or rent and it includes photos of the home, virtual and 3D home tours so you can take a quick look around without having to go there yourself, various filters for finding what you need in a home, and also the ability to tag and share features of homes with your partner or roommate who will share the home with you.
Trulia
Sometimes a home might be nice because it fits your needs about being close to the stores, to work or school, quiet, and so on. But you won’t truly know how a home feels until you’ve lived there long enough and have integrated yourself into the community, and that’s something that Trulia is trying to solve.
The platform actually polls owners of homes in a particular neighborhood to find out what they think of the place, how they feel, whether the people there are friendly, whether it’s safe, and so on. Because these are things you won’t know until you stay there, having a heads up could be useful in helping make your decision.
Realtor.com Real Estate
As the name already implies, this is a real estate app that comes with a ton of features that makes narrowing down your search a lot easier. For example, one of the features of the app is that you can search by commute time.
Since staying smack in the middle of the city can be expensive, home buyers might need to search neighboring suburbs, and the further out it gets, the cheaper it can be. The problem is that you need to balance out price and how long it can take you to get to work or school. After all, if you need to commute and hour to work and an hour home, is it really worth paying less?
The app also offers up other useful features like virtual home tours, and if you like what you see, you can also make an offer right away.
Facebook Marketplace
While Facebook might primarily be known as a social media platform, the company has launched features that make it easier for people to buy and sell things, including homes. Granted, it might not necessarily be as feature rich compared to dedicated real estate apps, but given how many users are on Facebook, there is a good chance you could find something that you like.
Of course, you should probably hire a real estate agent to help you navigate all the legal hurdles and processes needed to buy a home, but for a quick browse, it could be good enough for some.
Compass Real Estate
Imagine driving through a neighborhood and you’re admiring the home and the surroundings and think that it would be nice to move here, but how do you know if there are homes here for sale? That’s one of the interesting features of Compass, where if you allow the app to have Bluetooth access, it can actually connect to nearby Compass signs for properties that are for sale.
In fact, in some instances you might actually be able to find homes that haven’t put themselves up for sale yet but are planning to, so you can go ahead and get in contact with the company’s agents to try and set something up before it is taken off the market.