Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate LLC is offering an iPhone application that detects the user’s location when they snap photos on home tours and automatically provides them with more information about the home and its surrounding neighborhood.
The iPhone app, Home Selection Assistant, also allows users to put together photo albums for each room in homes they are interested in, creating searchable content that can be synced with iTunes for access on a home computer or shared on Facebook or via e-mail, the company said in a press release.
When a photo is snapped, the iPhone’s built-in Global Positioning System (GPS) allows the application to detect the user’s location and upload neighborhood data from Onboard Informatics, including information on local schools, demographics, comparable home prices and crime rates. Past pricing and sales history of the home being toured are also available, and all content can also be accessed by entering an address.
The application can also access more than 150 articles on home renovation, remodeling and staging available online at www.bhgrealestate.com.
Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate tapped Zumobi, a mobile media company that designs, develops and publishes branded applications for smartphones, to help build Home Selection Assistant. It is available free on Apple’s App Store and can be downloaded at www.bhgrealestate.com/iphone.
Jeff Turner, president of Zeek Interactive and founder of virtual tour provider RealEstateShows.com, said in a blog post that the app is "solely focused on consumer benefit" with no obvious attempts to direct users to a real estate agent or away from the home they are interested in.
"If I were out looking at houses, this is an app I would appreciate," Turner writes. "This is an app I would use."
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