Real Estate Droid is an app aimed at house hunters and their real estate agents.  It provides property listings (in list form or map form), value estimates, mortgage quotes, a loan calculator, and information about the user’s current neighborhood (based on live-updating GPS coordinates).  Users can save their favorite listings (or enter them manually), and then take pictures and notes of their favorites for later review.

“This was super helpful while house hunting. The ability to save favorites with notes is very useful.”

Harry

“A must have for any home buyer or real estate agent, providing you with real quicktime information. If you’re buying or selling a home you need this app.”

Daryl

Project Highlights

This project consumes a variety of web services, from Google, Zillow, Cyberhomes, Trulia, Rentometer, Walkscore, and Mortgage Marvel.  These services provide data in RESTful JSON or XML, as well as via SOAP.  Neighborhood info and property look-up access the phone’s live location updates, but are careful to turn off GPS when the app is sent to the background.  The saved properties are stored in a SQLite database, and photos are added from listings or from the device’s camera.  The app displays properties for sale on a Google Maps overlay or a list.

Results

• #7 peak ranking in Finance category
• 160,000 downloads
• 3.5 star rating out of 5

* Due to loss of data sources from Google, Zillow, and Cyberhomes, this app is no longer available in the Android Market.  I will re-launch a leaner successor to this app in January, 2012.