Shopping for Your New Home with Technology

Apps have made many aspects of life easier, and that’s certainly been the case with real estate. Apps for mortgages, home planning, decorating, and searching for property have inundated the mobile market, making it even easier for you to search, plan for, or design a home. Here are some of the choicest.

Real estate by Trulia

This app has made it easy to search for homes on sale and available rentals after rolling out a slick new design. The app is location based to make it even easier to find nearby properties without having to wade through hundreds of listings.

You can narrow down the search by lot size, the year the home was built, or square footage. The best feature is the open house tab, which allows users to see what’s available for viewing on a particular day.

Homesnap

If you’ve absolutely fallen in love with that condo on Bentley Beach, you can snap a quick picture and Homesnap will pull up the necessary information about that piece of real estate, including price, square footage, and amenities.

It even gives users information on good investment return or appreciation potential if you’re mainly looking to flip a house. That makes this app ideal for real estate hunters who are hoping to make a profit on their purchase.

The MLS Apps: Zillow.com, Realtor.com

Nobody can go wrong with using a good old-fashioned MLS search: It has the most up-to-date and complete information available. The map feature is especially helpful when you’re driving around looking for a house.

This will inform you about the neighborhood comps, which real estate investors will love. These apps also have a nifty “sold” feature that shows which properties in the neighborhood are under contract.

Zillow Mortgage

It’s easy to jump ahead and forget that if the financing isn’t in place, then looking at houses can be a waste of time. The Zillow Mortgage app was recently updated because of reports that thirty percent of online visitors are mobile.

The app provides prospective home buyers with constant access to loan quotes, refinance calculators, and payment estimators. It also helps shoppers to calculate exactly how much house they can comfortably afford and provides individual rate quotes from Zillow-approved lenders.

Home Design 3D

Image Source: Pixabay

Sometimes buying an already existing home isn’t in the cards. With the Home Design 3D app, home buyers can actively design a home they would like to build from the ground up.

If you’re already working with a contractor, floor plans or blueprints can be imported to the app and easily synchronized with other users for cohesive collaborations. The 3D mode provides a realistic version of what the plans will look like when they finally come to fruition.

Shopping for a house used to be time-consuming and required constant communication with a Realtor. Armed with current technology, however, buyers can look for homes at their leisure, expediting the home buying process and getting them into their dream house as soon as possible.