Best Practices for Outsourcing Real Estate Mobile App Development

Any modern business benefits from the presence of a mobile app. We live in the times when we want to have everything at our fingertips, so the easier and speedier a transaction is, the greater the chance of customer satisfaction and, ultimately, a closed deal. In the world of real estate, properties change hands at the speed of a keystroke, so you need the backup of technology to stay ahead of the competitors. Whether you’re an experienced realtor or a tech-savvy startup, outsourcing the development of real estate applications can be your secret weapon.

What is a Real Estate Mobile App?

A real estate mobile app is a specialized application designed for mobile devices, which taps into the needs of real estate marketers, architects, construction professionals, property buyers, sellers, and renters. Such apps can serve various purposes, from property search and listings to virtual tours, 3D views, and advanced property management. A well-designed app will offer features tailored to enhance customer experience, efficiency, convenience, and communication. 

While virtually every business has a navigable website with a powerful search engine and useful extensions, most customers are inclined to browse and search for items on their phones. While a mobile version of your website could be helpful here, nothing will match the convenience and user-friendliness of a professional mobile app. And outsourcing mobile app development is a good idea to save effort, cost, and time, while still getting the essential advantage.

The Benefits of a Real Estate Mobile App

Not to delve too much into comparisons with other industries, we will plunge straight into exploring the benefits of real estate mobile apps. Realtors will understand that a smartphone has a number of useful features a desktop or laptop computer cannot boast. Think of a gyroscope, a GPS location, and multiple cameras, which will help you determine your orientation in space. These features are essential for creating a lifelike virtual tour of a place or placing virtual buildings in real spaces where users can walk around them and preview them using mobile devices.

The above features serve to enhance customer experience and make the search for property easier and more convenient. But the benefits of real estate mobile app development are not just customer-facing. The benefits also stretch to the whole real estate business and relations with other stakeholders: architects, construction professionals, engineers, property managers, real estate marketers, landlords, and sellers.

While the advantages may seem obvious, we will just briefly recap them before discussing the option of application development outsourcing. 

A proper, innovative real estate mobile app provides a user-friendly experience with intuitive interfaces and accessible data available in real time. While every business values 24/7 connectivity, mobile apps are the perfect way of staying connected with your clients, colleagues, and other professionals involved in the construction or property management process. Last but not least, mobile apps drive greater user engagement through personalized alerts and recommendations.  

Outsourcing vs In-House Development

While some might be tempted to develop a real estate app in-house, it is a good idea to consider all the pros and cons of the option and compare it with outsourcing this task to specialists. While in-house application development gives you 100% control of the process and ensured compliance with your company standards, you can experience some difficulties in obtaining and managing the necessary skillset in your team. The cost of hiring or training people to design real estate mobile apps can be just too much.

On the other hand, outsourcing mobile app development gives you access to a wider talent pool and uses the knowledge of experienced developers working on specialized, often licensed software. This accounts for innovative solutions and faster development and helps with the scalability of your project in the event of changes. Those who value the ability to control the process might be a bit disappointed, though: when outsourcing the development of a mobile app, you can face communication challenges with the external team. 

While some concerns may appear in regard to data privacy and security, these are easily solved with appropriate online and cloud safeguards. After all, the world has been successfully dealing with online collaboration and globally dispersed teams for quite a few years now. As we will try to show below, security may even be greater when working with a reputable external mobile app developer.

That said, we will discuss the specific advantages of outsourcing real estate mobile app creation, which include: cost-effectiveness, shorter time-to-market, scalability, and better security.

Cost-Effectiveness

When outsourcing app development, you avoid the expense of maintaining an in-house team or training your staff to master the necessary skills. This includes any licenses for the software needed to design mobile real estate apps. 

Outsourcing means you pay for specific services only when you need them, without the long-term commitment of hiring full-time employees. As mentioned above, this option also means you gain access to a global pool of talent. This often entails competitive rates, compared to hiring locally or maintaining a full-time team of mobile app designers.

Last but not least, the costs of an outsourced project are more predictable, because you always ask for a quote before starting the collaboration. Even with some last-minute changes, you know the ballpark figure and can plan your budget accordingly.  

Shorter Time-to-Market

When you reach out to a reputable outsourcing company, that specializes in app development, you can be sure they rely on a set of well-tested procedures. They have streamlined processes, experienced teams, and established workflows. This will facilitate communication, minimize the empty back-and-forth, and allow your app to reach the market faster.

While coming up with a working mobile app in-house is feasible, it can be a challenge for your budget and workload. Collecting and organizing the necessary data is time-consuming, so you would need a dedicated team to handle this task. 

A specialized app developer agency will ask you to provide the exact information they need and do their own research so that you can focus on your core business. 

Scalability

Outsourcing provides flexibility in team size. You can easily expand or reduce the scope of your project. During peak development phases, you can expand the team, and during maintenance or low-demand periods, reduce it. This is closely related to the cost-effectiveness aspect of outsourcing because you don’t need to maintain a full-time team of app developers. 

Experienced realtors will recognize the value of specialization. While doing tasks in-house might seem cheaper, flooding your regular team with extra tasks that require extensive competencies might seriously disrupt your core business. Consequently, it leads to unexpected expenses, shortcomings, delays, which might damage your reputation.

Better Security

Those who are concerned about the security aspects of outsourcing can rest assured. Reputable outsourcing agencies have effective procedures in place to guarantee secure online collaboration and data-sharing.

First of all, you sign specific NDAs to safeguard your intellectual property and ensure the ownership of deliverables. Secondly, the recent pandemic boosted the development of secure cloud solutions to facilitate the work of dispersed teams. This means you can safely engage specialists from anywhere in the world, and be sure your data is not compromised.

Best Practices for Real Estate Application Development Outsourcing

When you decide outsourcing mobile app development sounds like a good option for your real estate business, we have a handful of useful guidelines to help you ensure you’re making the most of this opportunity. These include defining the price model, setting a budget, keeping relevant documentation, establishing milestones, researching the software development provider, coming up with a business plan, and post-development support.

Define a Pricing Model

When it comes to outsourcing the development of a mobile app, choosing the right pricing model is crucial. Before you start collaborating with a chosen agency, decide which option suits your  business best:

• Fixed-Price Model: Agree on a fixed price for the entire project. This option is good for well-defined projects with accurate requirements. You get predictable costs, but on the downside, there’s little space for changes.
• Time and Materials Model: Pay based on the actual time and resources invested. This is a better option for projects with evolving requirements. It offers much more flexibility but needs hands-on management and supervision due to dynamically changing costs.
• Dedicated Team Model: a team of dedicated specialists from various fields will collaborate on your project, ensuring end-to-end service. This is recommended for long-term projects or ongoing maintenance, as it offers the necessary scalability. On the other hand, it requires consistent attention.
• Hybrid Model: this is a combination of fixed-price and time and materials models. You decide which steps of the project need a fixed-price approach, and which will be better for the time and materials approach. This option offers a balance between predictability and flexibility but needs careful planning.
• Outcome-Based Model: in this option, you pay for specific outcomes, and measures in line with predefined metrics. This approach is suitable for projects with precisely defined criteria and a set of measurable features to go by. 

Set a Budget

The starting point of defining a budget for your real estate mobile app is planning what your business can afford. Make sure how much you’re ready to invest in your mobile app. Secondly, determine the goal of the application: do you need it for customer engagement, brand awareness, sales process, or property management? 

Before you come up with a budget, conduct a competitor analysis and study similar apps in your segment. Explore their features and see which of them you need. This will help you leverage your expectations and allocate the necessary resources.

Finally, remember about future maintenance costs and updates to your real estate mobile application. To make sure it works for you, you need to keep it in shape and fix any bugs as soon as they appear.

Documentation is Key

To make sure collaboration with a real estate mobile app developer is successful, you need to maintain proper documentation throughout the whole process. First of all, you need the project requirements document, which outlines the purpose and features of the envisaged app. 

Once the specialists provide you with mockups, you should save them for future reference to avoid unnecessary back-and-forth. One of the most important documents is the entire technical specifications sheet, with tech stack, APIs, databases, and third-party integrations. 

At the later stages of the project, you may want to come up with test scenarios to make sure the app lives up to your expectations. All the time, you should also keep detailed legal documentation, to make sure the whole process is in line with mandatory laws and industry regulations.

Establish Milestones for Increased Productivity

To establish the milestones, first define the clear objectives of the project. To do this, recap the goals of your real estate mobile app: what problem does it solve? Who is it designed for? What functionalities will it support?

Break down your project into stages. You would normally start with creating mockups, setting databases and APIs, backend and frontend activities, user interface, and end with testing and quality assurance.

Set realistic deadlines for the subsequent stages and allow the necessary time for testing and pre-launch activities. While the deadlines are defined and milestones are known, remember to track the project and address any bottlenecks as soon as they appear.

Research the Software Development Provider

Once you have sorted out your project requirements, search for a suitable partner to help you out with developing the real estate app of your dreams. Explore Google, LinkedIn, or Clutch to find a few matches, find their portfolio on Behance, and contact companies with suitable experience.

Before contacting the agency, read online reviews and look for client testimonials, as well as ratings on Clutch. It’s best if you look for referrals from clients with projects similar to yours.

Finally, contact the agency of your choice and enquire about the technologies and software they use, and assess their expertise in frontend, backend, and mobile app development. Ask about their procedures and workflows, to make sure you’re fine with their communication strategy. And definitely find out that their security measures are sufficient for your business and consistent with your local mandatory law.

Having said all that, don’t forget to check out their prices.

Maintenance and Support Post-Development

Make sure you’re now on your own with any issues that might crop up after the app goes live. To guarantee this, you need to include it in the contract with the real estate mobile app developer. To start with, define the scope, duration, and terms of ongoing assistance.

You can usually choose one of three support models:

• Corrective Maintenance: When the authors of your app are responsible for addressing bugs, errors, and issues reported by users.
• Adaptive Maintenance: When the support is extended to accommodate changes in the environment (e.g., OS updates, new devices).
• Perfective Maintenance: Constant improvement and optimization for better user experience.

The minimum you can ask for is fixing the bugs and coming up with ad hoc patches. Of course, as the end user of the real estate mobile app, you will be responsible for monitoring the app for any issues and reporting them. 

You should also keep an eye out for security threats. If your outsourcing partner provides extensive support, you can also count on them to help you boost the performance of the mobile app.

Choosing the Right Outsourcing Mobile App Development Partner

To find a reliable and knowledgeable real estate mobile app developer, make sure the agency of your choice has expertise in the real property sector. Although tech stack and computer literacy are crucial, it is also important that the developer knows the target market and can boast an extensive portfolio of successful projects. 

If they are willing to share their testimonials or portfolio on Behance, you can explore the first-hand evidence of their expertise. And remember that collaboration based on trust can take you far.