The Leading iPhone Real Estate Apps: A Roundup

September 10, 2009
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by Stephanie Kanowitz

Meandering through a neighborhood with a pad and pencil in hand and looking for “for sale” signs can be a nice way to spend an afternoon. Or you can pocket those archaic tools and do some serious high-tech research using your Apple iPhone or iTouch. After all, a piece of paper can’t show you the pricing history or pictures of a house, and it definitely won’t give you driving directions.

We’ve posted about individual iPhone apps before, but we thought it would be useful to put together a list of the leading five all in one post. Here they are – and they’re free at the iTunes store.

Zillow Real Estate – Named the best real estate app by O’Reilly Media, Zillow Real Estate lets you see what homes are worth and what’s for sale at the tips of your fingers. It has the low-down on more than 90 million homes in the United States and uses GPS to figure out which ones are closest to your current location. You can also check Zestimate values — Zillow’s estimated market value — property information, recently sold homes and Make Me Move homes, a Zillow feature that lets homeowners tell others what price they would be willing to sell their home for, without actually putting it on the market.

You can save searches and e-mail your finds to a friend. If you want to follow the status of a property, you can track it by signing up to get notifications when new results come in. When this app became available in April, it had 15,666 downloads in the first 24 hours, according to Zillow’s Web site.

Redfin’s iPhone app

Redfin Real Estate – Just released on August 29th, this newbie app already has an average customer rating of four out of five stars. Like the others, Redfin lets you view details and photos of homes, but it also lets you save your own pictures and notes to your Redfin account to help you remember what you’ve seen. Available in limited areas, D.C. and Baltimore made the cut.

Real Estate Search – NearBuy – The winner of the 2009 Reynolds Journalism Institute iPhone app award, NearBuy ranks #2 in the real estate app category, according to its iTunes store page. The app lets users search for condos and houses by location using the iPhone’s existing LocateMe technology. It culls results from a variety of real estate classified databases and shows them on a map. It also displays nearby parks and schools.

Trulia Real Estate Search – Launched in August 2008, this app is the most popular real estate application on iTunes, according to its page. Its claim to fame is its focus on showing you what open houses are available today or during the upcoming weekend. Customize your search by zip code and property type and then get driving directions through Google Maps.

Coldwell Banker Real Estate Search – This app from the national brokerage not only lets you search for homes anywhere in the United States, but also for homes on the market in 25 other countries. Save your search efforts with My Coldwell Banker function, which lets you archive searches and properties in your profile.

All of the above apps work with the iPhone and iTouch and require iPhone OS 3.0 or later, although Trulia also works with OS 2.0.