Online brokerage company Sawbuck Realty has launched a mobile application for Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch, the company announced today.
"We’ve been hard at work on the app since last summer," said Guy Wolcott, Sawbuck’s co-founder and CEO, in a statement. "Our goal was to do more than shrink our home search site and put it on your phone."
The app contains more than 550,000 for-sale home listings provided via multiple listing services in 13 markets. In addition to searching for-sale homes, users can also find open houses and, if they register, view recently sold homes.
The app allows users to find homes near them through GPS or by typing in a location. Users can see listings in a map, list, or photo view. Through an interface designed to look like a table saw, users have the option to refine the results by price range, number of bedrooms and property type, including bank-owned homes and short sales.
For-sale listing descriptions include photos, property details, the listing’s price history, days on market, property tax and school information, similar listings nearby, and the name of the listing agent and brokerage.
Users can also choose to set up e-mail alerts, arrange a self-guided tour of a home with driving directions, or set up an agent-guided tour with a local real estate agent. If they have questions, they can call Sawbuck with one touch.
Users can also "check in" by posting their location on Facebook or Twitter, and they can share listings via those social networks, e-mail or text message. They can also take and save their own photos or videos of properties they visit, and create their own notes.
A checklist for each room allows them to jot notes about first impressions, special features or minute details. The app syncs with users’ Sawbuck.com accounts, allowing them to access saved information through their personal computers.
Users can also rate listings privately, from zero (worst) to four stars (best). Homes with at least three stars get saved as "favorites." The app also saves a history of recent searches and the listings a user has viewed.
The app offers local market statistics, including the number of homes for sale in a market area; median list and sale prices; months of inventory; and market activity in the past 30 days, including new listings, price reductions, contracts signed, and sales. Users can also compare the number of listings and median list prices in surrounding areas.
Sawbuck also announced an expansion to its 13th market, Philadelphia, today. The expansion adds some 200,000 listings to the site, of which 50,000 or so are active for-sale listings.
Besides Philadelphia, the app also covers all of Sawbuck’s other current markets: Baltimore, the San Francisco Bay Area, Boston, Chicago, Dallas/Ft. Worth, Houston, California’s Inland Empire, Los Angeles, Phoenix, San Diego, the Washington, D.C., metro area, and Providence, R.I.
As new cities are rolled out on the Sawbuck site, they will also be available on the app, the company said.
