5 Key Apps To Help You Find a New Home With Your Smartphone

Shopping for a home can be an incredibly stressful event. Not only is a house the single most expensive thing most people will ever purchase in their lives, it is also hard to find a house that suits your needs perfectly. When you are spending potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars on something, you do not want to feel like you are settling. You want the house you end up with to be a place you can be happy and live your life without regret.

With the help of our smartphones, the process of buying a house can become a lot less painful. There are all kinds of awesome applications available that make finding a house easier. Sure, most of what these apps offer are readily available on the Internet, but with a smartphone, you can take the valuable information contained within the applications with you to the house when you see it. These apps will make buying a house more pleasant, and they will help you find the house of your dreams.

Realtor.com Real Estate Search (Windows, Android, iOS)

This is one of the most widely used real estate applications, and with good reason. It has so many features that make shopping for a house easier. One of my favorite is the price-reduced option, which automatically shows you houses in your area that have had price drops recently. This helps you find motivated sellers. It also has a foreclosure, recently sold, and area search. It has lots of photos of the different houses.

If you are looking to buy a house, this is an app you absolutely need to have.

Walk Score (iOS)

Walk Score is an awesome iOS application that rates the walkability of a place. For urban areas, where people often do not drive cars, knowing how many places are within walking distance is incredibly valuable. If you are looking for a house, and you know you need to get coffee every single day, knowing where the nearest coffee shop is could be incredibly important in helping you decide if that particular house is right for you.

Zillow Real Estate (Windows, Android, iOS, BlackBerry)

Zillow has an interesting feature that allows you to access homes that you won’t see everywhere. This feature is called Make Me Move. Here, users post their houses if they aren’t quite sure about selling. It’s like a feeler, and if they get an offer they like, they can sell their house. Because houses here are not listed on the open market, you will not find them in other apps. This could be a place to fall in love with a house that you might not see anywhere else. Besides that, it has all the standard search and photo features that you would expect from a high quality real estate app.

Trulia (Android, iOS)

Trulia is another fantastic way to find a house. It has a slick user interface that makes searching for houses easy. It uses GPS to find houses in your area, which makes searching quick and painless. My favorite feature is the alerts, which follow the search parameters you lay out and automatically alert you when a house goes on the market that matches your preferences. This lets you see the house right away, and if you love it, make an offer before everyone shopping for houses see it.

Real Estate by Smarter Agent (Windows, Android, iOS, BlackBerry)

This app is awesome because it is custom made by each real estate agent. So if your agent uses this service the app is tailor made to their style, and it will help you find a house easily. This is a perfect way for real estate agents to make themselves stand out. If your agent does not have a custom app, fear not, because they have a standard free application that allows you to search for your dream house with all the pictures and ease of use you’d expect.