House hunting done the old-fashioned way — checking the local classifieds, noting the “For Sale” signs you spot on your way to work, and chatting with your network of realtor friends — can be one of life’s most stressful undertakings. But it doesn’t have to be. Thanks to venerable platforms such as Zillow, Realtor.com, and others, finding homes that fit your criteria — and fall within your budget — is a lot easier than it used to be. Better yet? Most of the aforementioned platforms are free.
But there are more services than you might think. To help make your digital house-hunting experience a little easier, we’ve rounded up the best real estate apps we can find in an easy-to-browse list.
Redfin
If you’re looking for a place to call home, you can’t go wrong with Redfin. Thanks to features like a foreclosure notifier, short sales alters, and for-sale-by-owner listing updates, it’s one of the most holistic real estate apps on the market. You can search nearby homes, schools, condos, open houses, and town houses, and see photos, top-down maps, and more about prospective properties. A host of built-in sharing tools also let you send your favorites via text message, email, or social media, and if one strikes your fancy, you can book an open house or home tour with Redfin’s Real Estate Agent feature.
Homes.com
Homes.com puts millions of homes, apartments, condos, and town home listings at your fingertips. Better yet, you can sort the results by neighborhood market conditions, neighborhoods, foreclosure status — which includes listings from REO, HUD, and others — and project your likely mortgage or rent payments with the Homes.com calculator. Each listing is packed with property photos and stats, too, and when you find one that piques your interest, you can share it via a text message, email, and a number of other avenues.
Xome
Xome, an integrated real estate platform, aims to streamline the home-hunting process with innovative search tools. Xome Zoom lets you “zoom in” on any of the 100 million homes in Zoom’s property list (refreshed every 15 minutes), and filter search results by property type, price range, the number of bedrooms and bathrooms, nearby schools, square footage, open houses, and a slew of other popular metrics. Xome’s Walk Score and school information also show which communities might be a good fit for you and your family, while Xome’s aptly-titled Value feature shows the market value for a given property. One of the app’s other hallmarks, Xome Concierge, puts you in touch with an agent, who can schedule a showing and answer questions about the property at hand.
Real Estate by Smarter Agent
Real Estate by Smarter Agent collates house-hunting data in a single place. You can narrow down listings to recently-sold homes, homes within a given geographic area, and homes listed by third parties like Apartments.com. Smart Agent’s GPS technology also pinpoints your location, city, and zip code, and lets you refine your search based on address, city, and zip code. Other searchable criteria includes price, the number of beds and baths, taxes, interior and exterior features, property type, and distance. Every listing is also accompanied by pictures, an interactive map, and a sharing feature that allows you to text and email listings to your friends and family. You can even save homes to the app’s search function for access later.
Century 21 Local Listing Search
Century 21’s app makes it easy to sort nearby home listings. You can personalize searches by an assortment of metrics — including the number of bedrooms and bathrooms, price, square footage, and neighborhood — and get listing alerts when new properties come on the market. After you’ve identified a few top contenders, you can scout out the surrounding areas for restaurants, grocery stores, and shopping centers, or draw your own search area using the app’s traffic feature. When you’re ready to buy, one tap connects you to a Century 21 agent who’ll walk you through the process.
Zillow
Zillow is one of the most comprehensive — and customizable — real estate services on the market. Its Zestimate tool lets you look up the rent or worth of any property in the United States, and robust search tools let you search by foreclosure stats, property type (single-family homes, apartments, townhomes, condos, and more), geographic location, address, region, price, and features such as the number of beds and baths. Social tools include a Renter profile, which helps you reach potential landlords and realtors, and a sharing tool that lets you circulate finds among friends and family. When you’re finally ready to commit, Zillow makes it easy to track down a local lender who’ll pre-approve you for a mortgage.
HomeSnap
HomeSnap isn’t your average home-hunting app. Snap a picture of any home, and the app shows details like home value estimates, interior photos, beds, baths, taxes, lot boundaries, related schools, school ratings, and more. HomeSnap says it has 20-percent more agent listings than national portals, and that its buying tools are “best in class.” It certainly does seem that way, especially given you can also chat with realtors and landlords directly after taking a photo.
Trulia
Trulia’s bursting at the seams with time-saving features designed to make house searching a cinch. After you’ve filtered home listings, you’ll gain access to an immersive collection of photos and video tours, along with interactive maps with crime reports, school ratings, restaurants, shops, and more. You can search for homes and apartments for rent by location, feature, size, price, and keyword, and share your favorites with friends or contact the listing agent directly. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Trulia features an affordability breakdown that calculates the full cost of a property, as well as an open house scheduler, a mortgage calculator, voice controls, a chat platform, and support for Android Wear smartwatches.
Realtor.com
The Realtor.com app lets you find nearby properties you otherwise might miss; it claims to show more homes for sale than any other real estate app. You can browse listings (updated every 15 minutes) by snapping real-life “For Sale” signs, or by swiping through the Android Wear smartwatch app. You can also filter listings based on the address, city, zip code, home prices, the number of beds and baths, square footage, and a multitude of other metrics, and listings include information about price, sales, schools, and more. The app even supports Google’s Chromecast, meaning you can stream open house and apartment info — including directions — to your TV.
LoopNet
LoopNet claims to have more traffic, listings, and geographic coverage than any other commercial real estate marketplace. We don’t know if that’s true or not, but we do know it can’t hurt in your search for your next home. LoopNet has tons of search filters to narrow down what you really want, and once you find a suitable fit, it has data on each property you look at, as well as extensive photos, street views, financial details, and more. It even has a watch list, so you can mark properties you like, and you’ll be notified once anything about that property changes.
Real Estate by Movoto
Movoto’s mission is simple: Make real estate easy. While we can’t say if that’s an attainable goal, Movoto’s app certainly makes choosing your next residence a lot simpler than you might imagine. First, there’s the impressive set of filters you can apply to your search, including filters for properties with pools — how the other half live, and all that — and the maps built into the app show the nearest amenities, schools, and other places you’d need to know about. When you’ve found what you’re looking for, one tap will put you in touch with a prescreened Movoto agent who will help you to seal the deal.
Looking for ways to kit out your home when you’re settled in? Check out our favorite smart home tech of 2017, our favorite new home gadgets, and don’t forget to secure your space with the best security cameras.
Update: We’ve gone through this list and made sure everything was still accurate. We also removed Dwellr, and added Real Estate by Movoto and LoopNet. Happy house hunting!
