The 7 Best Real Estate Apps of 2022

Zillow’s app wins best overall because of its massive scope. According to its site, Zillow is the most-visited real estate website in the United States. Its efficient features include sharing a prospective property with your partner or roommate as well as the ability for renters to begin the application process quickly. The app covers virtually every need the user could want.

Zillow, founded in 2004 by two former Microsoft executives, is one of the leading apps in the real estate market. When a realtor or seller changes a property status—from “for sale” to “pending and under contract,” for example—you’ll see that change in the app within 24 hours.

Zillow offers the option to list apartments for sale, rent, or lease as well as virtually tour properties and contact agents. Properties on Zillow also can be viewed through video tours and photographs. Users even can receive update notifications about selected properties from the app.

Property listings come from one or more of the multiple listing services, as well as from individuals posting their own homes for sale, auctions, foreclosures, and other properties.

Zillow is free of cost for buyers and sellers. The primary source of revenue for the app comes from advertising and lead generation costs from realtors. Zillow’s scale earns it the title of best overall because it boasts the largest inventory, many ways to search and sort for both home buyers and apartment renters, and convenient features like sharing favorites and built-in applications.

Xome Auctions is the best app for buying a property through an auction because of its comprehensive online bid listings. Like other apps, property details, photos, and map locations are shown, but Xome Auctions is the best because it also states whether the property is financeable or if it needs to be paid for in cash. 

The Xome Auctions app is available on both Android and Apple app stores and hosts one of the largest collections of exclusive properties. Users can also use Xome’s pre-auction feature to bid on properties early. Xome delivers transparent bidding and fast closing.

You can search for residential or commercial auctions by location, status, and auction asset type, such as bank-owned, short sale, or newly foreclosed. Sort properties by price, beds, baths, square feet, auctions starting soon, or by auctions ending soon. The app includes a walk, commute, and bike score along with listing and sales history so you can see the historical value for the property over time. 

The listings on the app come from multiple listing services as well as from exclusive Xome sources. The app wins best for auctions because of the comprehensive features available to the bidder. Details like financing, property and neighborhood statistics, alerts when someone else bids on a property you are watching, and property price history all keep the bidder well-informed. Xome Auctions further exceeds its competitors with an efficient e-signing capability for contracts.

Redfin is an actual real estate brokerage firm that has created an app to take them to a national scale and revolutionize the buying and selling processes. The app is our choice as best for home purchases because it combines cutting-edge technology with actual Redfin real estate agents and customer service employees that keep the human element in the process.

Launched in 2006, Redfin allows the user to search for nearby houses, condos, and townhouses that are for sale or hosting an open house. You can book a home tour within the app. For sellers, the platform allows you to list your property for sale. It charges sellers who use the app a listing fee of 1.5% or 1.0% if you buy and sell with Redfin, which is lower than traditional listing broker fees. It also pays a commission rebate to the buyer if the buyer uses a Redfin agent. That potential dollar figure is shown in the app listing.

Redfin’s app interface is simple and easy to use. Users can review some neighborhood details and set up notifications to alert you to every house that becomes available and meets your criteria.

Redfin earns its revenue through listing fees, commissions, and advertising fees. It earns best for home purchases because of its clever blend of innovative technology balanced by timely and customized human interaction to help the deal close swiftly and keep the buyer’s and seller’s stress levels to a minimum.

We awarded Trulia the best for home values because it provides more information about what goes into a home value than any other app.

Trulia, which was founded in 2005 and acquired by Zillow Group in 2015, has high reviews in the two major app stores. It uses Zillow data to provide home values and other information, but it presents the information differently than Zillow.

The service allows the user to view a property in multiple ways. For instance, you can view the property itself, shopping, eating establishments, schools, commute times, and neighborhood demographic stats. You can search for apartments as well as homes with two different apps, Trulia and Rent Trulia, for more personalized searches.

Regarding demographics, the app can show you what locals say about the area, like the ease of parking or the walkability of the neighborhood at night, for example. Trulia is the best for home values because it builds its home value estimates from more factors than any other app, such as city and county assessments, local comparative sales of similar homes, and price history trends. Eight out of 10 times they are within 20% of the sales price.

The app is free for users.

Realtor.com is associated with the National Association of Realtors. Realtors can update their listings daily for free, making it a winner for the best for rentals. By updating their listings, landlords benefit from finding qualified prospective tenants faster.

Realtor.com was founded in 1996 and is currently owned by Move, Inc., a branch of News Corporation (NWS). The Realtor app is the best for rental unit owners because it shows when the rental listing was last updated, which is helpful when users are looking for up-to-date information. It provides surrounding area information on schools and noise—another primary interest. An app that caters to its target market as Realtor does enjoys lots of views. Combine all of that renter traffic with the fact that landlords can list their property and accept applications for free, and you can see why Realtor earned our nod for best app for rentals.

The app shows properties through pictures and sometimes video tours, making it easy for a rental property owner to highlight the best features of the home and give prospective tenants a good feel for the property before they ever walk in the door. Realtor’s app is free to use and earns its revenue mainly through advertising.

Apartments.com is a renter’s favorite place thanks to the 1.1 million listed rentals on the site combined with amazing imagery to show prospective tenants what the property offers. Prospective tenants can apply directly through the app.

Apartments.com, founded in 1992, has been owned by the CoStar Group (CSGP) since 2014. CoStar researches the best commercial real estate companies in the United States. It has helped Apartments.com by providing them with a large research crew providing attractive listings through its professional photography and videography.

The app’s revenue comes mostly from advertising fees as well as the application fees that cost up to $29 for every 10 applications in a 30-day period. Apartments.com won best for renters because of its large inventory of not only apartments but also rental houses, condos, and townhomes combined with its convenient “apply now” feature within the app. It has extensive search and sort capabilities that we found to be more hearty than other apps.

LoopNet.com is the best real estate app for entrepreneurs because it only lists commercial properties. This saves investors time and frustration because they do not have to sort and filter through homes and individual apartments for sale and rent.

LoopNet was founded in 1995 and is headquartered in Washington, D.C. The platform is owned by the CoStar Group, which owns several other information and marketplace websites. LoopNet is solely for commercial property investors. This is not an app to search for a home to buy and live in, nor to seek an apartment to rent.

Search by location, and whether you want a property to buy or lease. There are 12 property types to search, such as retail, healthcare, office, restaurant, and multifamily apartment buildings, for example. Filter by price, size, year built, and capitalization rate.

LoopNet’s app excels at efficiently connecting app users to commercial listing brokers, which is why it wins the best app for entrepreneurs. Investors and listing brokers can swiftly exchange information and schedule tours all from within the app. Since timing can be a critical factor when closing on an investment property, the app notifications, convenient communication, and streamlined listing inventory are important assets.

The platform earns its revenue through commissions, listing fees, and advertising fees.

Real estate apps are mobile applications aimed at making the process of property transactions easy. These apps are designed in a way that makes it easy for buyers, sellers, realtors, landlords, and investors to find each other quickly and conveniently.

Real estate apps consist of vast databases with hundreds of thousands, and in some cases millions, of properties listed in them. This helps buyers look for their ideal home within the comfort of their homes, cars, or even from across the country. Sellers, landlords, and property managers also benefit from these apps as they can post details of their listings on multiple channels.

Real estate apps also offer a convenient advertising platform for realtors and agents who are looking to build their client base and acquire leads. In a few years, these apps may drastically shrink the size of in-person brokerages.

Real estate apps perform a comparative market analysis to determine the value of a property. These apps use cutting-edge technology to track and import market trends, location, neighborhood, property condition, tax records, and nearby sales.

Following this step, the app analyses property details like the number of rooms, bathrooms, the size of the porch, the availability of parking spaces, gardens, and swimming pools, to name a few. The app will then study previous sales in the neighborhood with similar specifications.

Even though recent sales are an effective method of setting a valuation, real estate apps also look at current listings, pending sales, as well as the available inventory to determine more accurate results. All of these steps contribute to property valuation.

Real estate apps have faced accuracy issues from the start. One of the reasons real estate apps are so powerful and have overtaken older forms of property searching, such as newspapers and realtor-led home visits, is also the same reason the apps have fought accuracy challenges. Apps deliver exponentially more properties to buyers, renters, and investors because they scrape established databases on the internet for this information. If there is inaccurate information in one of those databases, it will translate that inaccuracy to the app as well.

The process is not foolproof, but app users can minimize this by cross-checking information across other apps and with actual human realtors. The real estate app companies are also trying to make up for the inaccuracies in their databases by employing researchers to verify information in their property records.