New York-based broker Corcoran Group has launched a new iPhone application to help real estate consumers connect with properties.

The app is very well executed and joins StreetEasy and Redfin as among my favorite real estate apps.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hb91e0jqQIk[/youtube]

To promote the new app, they commissioned Swedish artist Kari Modin to illustrate the key features of app. The ads will run in media outlets, online and on phone kiosks throughout the city.

The images are striking and I think it’s an important takeaway here; while real estate search apps are a hot ticket item right now — and I would suggest that any decent sized brokerage should be seriously evaluating their mobile strategy for 2010 — simply building and releasing an app isn’t enough.

It needs to be fully baked into to your overall marketing plan and supported through a well-imagined and targeted advertising campaign, which Corcoran has done.

There’s a land rush going on right now for screen space on smart phones and the window of opportunity for any broker to stake a claim will likely be short-lived. A few years from now and there will be likely dozens of “me-too” apps in any given market. Now’s the time to strike.

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French company MeilleurAgents.com (“best agents”) has released a mobile Android application that displays the value of every single building in Paris (value is displayed in price per square meter). Here’s a quick video demonstrating it in action:

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/6006262[/vimeo]

The application is very similar to Zillow’s iPhone app (see Zillow Takes Zestimates to the Streets); which also displays home values – but for me, the street level view is far more visually exciting than the top-down, satellite view presented in Zillow’s app.

The MeilleurAgents.com app uses the Layar Reality browser, and the app will be available shortly for the iPhone 3GS in France.

The release of iPhone 3.1 update now technically allows apps to overlay graphics on a live video stream, so we’re inching closer to true augmented reality. Some apps in the US already take advantage of this, the Yelp app’s hidden monocle feature for example.

The promise for augmented reality real estate applications is certainly exciting; virtual for-sale signs and property descriptions, even the layering of interior room photos over exterior views of home.

I’m sure  we’ll be seeing much more of these sort of apps in the months to come.

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Real estate technology is headed straight to the small screen.

‘Nuff said.

For more background on this – read some of these earlier posts:

• House Hunting On The Go
• Mobile Real Estate can Thank the iPhone
• Apple Releases SDK Kit for iPhone
• Mobile Real Estate Search Paradigm Just Shifted

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Homes.com joins the ranks of Trulia and StreetEasy this week and announced the launch of a new iPhone application (iTunes link).

The app is functional enough and grabs its listings from a combination of broker feeds and from the network of websites run by Homes.com parent Dominion Enterprises, which runs the Advanced Access, AgentAdvantage, eNeighborhoods, and Number1Expert web sites.

Real estate has been an exploding category on the iTunes store (though not at the same pace as tip calculators and fart applications), and so far we’ve seen a handful of the aforementioned search portals jump into the fray and even seen some of the brands join the frenzy (see Coldwell Banker Launches iPhone App). 

Ultimately however,  all of the dedicated real estate apps on the iPhone have a fairly standard feature set that includes maps, driving directions and property detail pages. And most take advantage of the iPhone’s location awareness too to show you any nearby properties.

But the problem with these apps frankly is that they all suffer from biggest issue affecting their desktop counterparts as well. Lack of inventory. Or lousy inventory.

This becomes even more apparent in a mobile environment when a listing that clearly has a for sale sign in the yard (especially one that you’re standing in front of), doesn’t appear in your search results. Or you when the property you’re being guided to has been removed from the market. 

House hunting is a natural fit for the mobile platform (see House Hunting On The Go) but suffers greatly from these inaccuracies. While the big search sites may have all but tied up the experience on the desktop, the palm top is still wide open. While there have been iPhone optimized web sites (like Intero’s) that are MLS backed unfortunately they haven’t moved to becoming dedicated apps yet and so suffer a little from the slight.

There is a real opportunity for an MLS driven search solution here, whether it be broker driven or association driven, to corner the mobile market in local markets. I, for one, am still waiting.

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Dash, the web enabled GPS unit is slashing 50 jobs and exiting the hardware business, according to GigaOM.

The futuristic unit pulled data from the ‘net and mashed it it up with turn-by-turn directions – a pretty slick idea, all things considered. In real estate they had deals going with content partners Coldwell Banker (see Dash GPS Get Real Estate Search) and Trulia (see Trulia Goes Mobile, Adds Feeds).

Mobile real estate search and location-based navigation technologies seem to me to be the perfect marriage. Personally, I’d love to be able to have the ability to output the results of a property search and then have the whole viewing tour guided via GPS.

I think the real problem in this case was not the concept, but the execution. Standalone units like the Dash are quickly being outpaced by smart devices like the iPhone and Blackberry Bold, which already incorporate GPS and do not require additional fees (beyond their monthly data plans).

And while applications on each of those platforms are not quite there yet to do a multi-stop property tour, they’re close (see iPhone real estate app showdown).

Dash seems to have recognized this, and by retooling their business for B2B, we may still see their technology show up in onboard navigation systems and other devices someday.

dash, mobile real estate, gps, real estate 2.0

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The real estate application category on the iPhone really seems to be filling out. When the upgraded version of the software launched in July, Puluwai was the only real estate specific search tool (see 5 Apps Every Real Estate Agent Should Have on Their iPhone).

But that’s now changing and it looks like there is an epic battle brewing for screen space on my phone.

Trulia iPhone application

Trulia’s app is notable because of the prominence they give to open houses on the home screen. I think this is a wise choice, since people will likely be using this app as they are out and about and will want to find out what’s open near them to go have a look.

The search experience was very easy on Trulia’s app – simply pushing the ‘All homes for sale’ button takes you to a list of all the properties near you. (Your definition of “All Homes” may vary).

Searching all homes, it was a bit frustrating because wasn’t immediately obvious how the results were returned – it didn’t seem to be sorted by price or even distance away. Using the Custom Search option does let you get a little more specific on how those results are returned however.

Personally, I would have loved to be able to refine the search from the All Homes results page to weed out the listings that didn’t fit what I was looking for. Unfortunately instead, Trulia makes you go back to the beginning and start over again.

The biggest disappointment with Trulia’s app however are the listing pages themselves. Next to Utopria’s offerings they pale in comparison (see Utopria Brings Property Listings to iPhone) Only one photo? Really?

Also, it’s great that you can show me where the property is on a map, but what does staring at a pin from space really tell me? I want a little more.

StreetEasy Real Estate

StreetEasy doesn’t waste any time. The New York based real estate site just takes you right into the search results as soon as you fire it up. I actually kind of enjoyed this – the less decisions I have to make up front the better. Let me get right to the meat and then let me start carving away.

(Though I have to say, the fact that the top listing it returned on its default search was an $80 million, 4 bedroom Central Park apartment made me feel more than a little bit inadequate.)

Clicking on the Edit Search button lets you refine the results and StreetEasy makes good use of the iPhone UI elements to make the refinement easy and enjoyable – lots of tumblers to spin up and down. Making search fun is one of the things the iPhone can be great at.

On the whole, StreetEasy succeeds where Trulia fails – showing you all the photos associated with a particular listing. Clicking on the thumbnail floats all the images upwards to a gallery like environment you can thumb through. I also loved the fact that the app lets you pull up the details on the building that a particular apartment is in.

Further, StreetEasy makes it really easy to tab between the listing description, the map and the agent’s contact information. Trulia struggles to accomplish this with a slightly clumsy popup menu.

HomeFinder

HomeFinder was created by developer Brandon Alexander (Alexander Mobile) and claims to bring over 4 million listings to the iPhone. Listings are drawn from Google Base, FSBO websites and feeds from several large MLSes and brokerages (not identified).

Compared to the two previous offerings, it’s pretty bare-bones, yet functional. HomeFinder gives you loads of options to filter a search – but it also kept crashing whenever it returned the results. So I’m going to have to withhold judgment on this app until we see a new revision.

So what’s the verdict?

StreetEasy’s iPhone app blows the competition out of the water in terms of ease-of-use, functionality and sheer slickness. Unfortunately it’s only available in New York City.

Trulia’s app looks great, gets off to a good start and then falls flat on its face. Frankly disappointing and hopefully future versions will add some of the missing features.

The others (Puluwai and HomeFinder)… well, compared to their commercial competitors, feel unpolished and struggle due to poor data sources.

So for now, there’s no clear winner. Unless you live in New York.

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Google just released the SDK for its new mobile phone platform, Android. Here’s a short video that demonstrates some of the features:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FJHYqE0RDg[/youtube]

Still looks a little rough around the edges – the UI feels a little unpolished; but this thing definitely looks promising for real estate technology developers. I especially liked the integration with Google Maps and StreetView. One could envision a mobile real estate search tool that could pull up listings, display them on a map and give you a virtual preview of the neighborhood, and then give you instant directions on how to get there.

One thing’s for sure, with the iPhone SDK coming in February as well, the next frontier for Real Estate 2.0 is surely going to be mobile.

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Real estate developers, get ready.

Direct from Steve in Apple – Hot News

Let me just say it: We want native third party applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK in developers’ hands in February. We are excited about creating a vibrant third party developer community around the iPhone and enabling hundreds of new applications for our users. With our revolutionary multi-touch interface, powerful hardware and advanced software architecture, we believe we have created the best mobile platform ever for developers.

There you have it. A software development kit for the iPhone and iPod Touch by Valentine’s Day next year.

The iPhone multi-touch interface is undoubtably one of the coolest features I’ve seen on any device for a long time and it’s a natural for manipulating real estate data.

So what could this hold for mobile real estate? The prospects are tantalizing…Zillow Zestimates on your iPhone? Trulia real estate search that syncs to a desktop widget?

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Who ever said wishes don’t come true (see House Hunting On The Go).

Realtor.com just went mobile on Windows Mobile devices.

Too bad I just switched to an iPhone.

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With my new iPhone firmly planted in my pocket wherever I go now, I’m fully convinced the long term impact of this product should not be underestimated (and yes, I’m painfully aware of all its shortcomings).

1000watt Blog has this to say:

Mark my words, one day, people will be in their cycle class surfing homes for sale on their iPhone and texting their agent. Or not. It’s up to you to create your future. Starting today, brokers, make sure your development team makes every corner your web presence Safari compatible. From agent sites right up to the corporate site.

It reminded me of what I wrote earlier this year, in my post House Hunting On The Go:

House hunting seems to me to be an inherently mobile activity but as yet all of the house hunting options we have require you to root yourself in front of the computer.

Despite its hefty pricetag, the iPhone is going to take smartphones to the streets. lf the line waiting inside my Apple Store for an 8gig iPhone was any indication (retirees, big-haired women, suburban soccer moms, even kids!) this gadget is going to be in a lot of people’s pockets.

While none of what it offers is new (my BlackJack can and did do more, with faster Internet speeds to boot), the iPhone just does it slicker. It does what Apple has always done, package up existing technologies and make them appealing and easy to use for the masses.

Realtors are going to love this thing. But more importantly, the average Joe is going to love this thing. And for that reason more than any other, the iPhone could be what really kickstarts mobile real estate.

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