Real estate software development guide: Features, trends, benefits & challenges

Real Estate Software Development Guide: Features, Trends, Benefits & Challenges

Nowadays, real estate software development has become a necessity for many companies that are looking for ways to automate business processes but struggle to find a suitable off-the-shelf solution. Having powerful software that improves employees’ productivity and facilitates business operations is vital for scaling business revenue and getting a competitive edge on the market.

However, building custom software for real estate businesses is a decision that requires thorough preparation and knowledge of the process specifics, key stages, and development approaches. In this guide, we provide detailed information on the peculiarities of real estate software development and answer the following questions:

• Why do you need to build custom real estate software?
• How can you choose the right type of software for your business?
• How should you approach the software development process?
• What are the challenges in real estate software development, and how can you overcome them?

Keep reading to learn how to build software fully tailored to your real estate business needs!

Reasons to build custom real estate software

Looking at the variety of off-the-shelf software solutions for real estate, you might wonder: Why should I build a custom tool for my business?

The truth is that not every business needs to develop its own solution to reach the ultimate effectiveness of business operations. However, there are several reasons that lead real estate companies to move from off-the-shelf solutions to custom software:

• Customization. With third-party solutions, you can access many features commonly needed for tackling day-to-day real estate operations. However, frequently, such solutions fail to cover businesses’ specific requirements. You’re limited to the business logic and user flows defined by the third-party provider and can’t add new features to meet new business needs. When choosing to build custom software, you get a solution with functionality that covers all your needs and ensures a convenient user experience.
• Need for quick scalability. As your business grows, your requirements for software capacities may change. Using off-the-shelf software, you may get to the point when this software can’t provide the capabilities you need to operate effectively. When operating with custom software, you can scale it as your business grows, and don’t worry about moving from one solution to another every time your needs change.
• Specific security requirements. Real estate companies must adhere to many regulations and standards to ensure the security and legality of their business. With custom software, you can apply all necessary security measures and not worry about sensitive data privacy and regulation compliance.

• Search for new revenue streams. Understanding the real estate industry landscape and key players’ uncovered needs, real estate companies can create disruptive solutions and monetize them via a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model to get an additional revenue stream.

• Access to innovative technologies. Artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality (VR), Internet of Things (IoT), and many other technologies can be incredibly useful in the real estate industry. According to the recent Deloitte survey, over 70% of surveyed real estate firms either plan or already use AI in their business. Although some off-the-shelf real estate tools already provide access to AI-powered functionality or integration with IoT devices, they don’t give companies an opportunity to use these technologies in the precise ways they need to improve their operations.

As you can see, custom software development for real estate industry offers several benefits that are impossible to get with third-party software:

• Unlimited customization
• Scalability
• Improved security
• Opportunity for revenue growth
• Opportunity to leverage the latest technologies

By opting for custom real estate software development, you can optimize workflow and provide a great customer experience, which will ultimately contribute to your business’s efficiency and profitability.

But how can you decide what to build? Real estate businesses operate in different sectors, each with its unique processes and needs. So, let’s first look at the common types of software used in real estate and their essential functionality.

Real estate software types & features: Discover the best solution for your business

Working in the real estate industry, you are probably already familiar with many types of software: CRM systems, data analytics platforms, marketplaces, and many others. However, off-the-shelf solutions frequently serve the needs of several industries and include only the common features. Here, we want to look at some software options and describe the features tailored to real estate business processes you may want to add to your custom solution.

CRM system

Customer relationship management systems are essential for companies that deal with multiple clients and need to ensure efficient communication and sales pipeline management. CRM systems allow to centralize the data from various communication channels, manage leads, and automate sales and marketing tasks. For real estate businesses, CRM solutions need to provide the following functionality:

• Integration with listing platforms, such as Zillow and Redfin, to capture leads from various sources and keep them all in one place.
• Customized dashboards to simplify sales and marketing performance analysis.
• Marketing automation tools to streamline marketing campaign execution.
• Task management tools to schedule appointments with prospects, follow-ups, and other activities.
• Pipeline management tools to track the leads throughout all stages of the sales process.

Property management software

Property management software is a versatile tool that helps real estate agents and property managers manage marketing activities, ensure an excellent tenant experience, and monitor portfolio performance. Before development, you should consider the following key features:

• A marketing management module to create and distribute listings and marketing materials across various real estate platforms.
• Communication tools to centralize communication with tenants, landlords, and vendors.
• A maintenance management module is used to track issue tickets, inspections, and repair progress.
• A data analytics module to track property performance metrics and make data-driven decisions.
• Accounting module to simplify the management of rent collection, keep financial records, and generate reports such as owner statements and rent rolls.

Real estate marketplace

Real estate firms create property marketplaces to reach a wider audience and make the search process easier for prospective buyers. You can also create a multi-vendor marketplace and turn it into an additional revenue stream for your company. To build a convenient marketplace, you can include the following features and modules:

• Listings management module to add, edit, and delete property listings.
• Integration with map services such as AzureMaps, Google Maps, and Mapbox to allow users to view properties’ locations.
• Search functionality with filtering options or smart algorithms to simplify the property search process.
• Account management tools tailored to specific user roles to allow them to manage their profiles effectively.
• Payment functionality to provide agents and brokers with convenient methods to pay for access to your platform.
• Estimating tools to enable users to calculate mortgage payments and explore available payment options.

Data analytics platform

Data analytics platforms help real estate professionals collect and analyze data to make data-driven decisions about their properties and investments. When building a real estate data analytics platform, you may want to add the following features:

• Integrations with your existing business software and third-party real estate data sources through APIs to easily access, collect, and analyze all information within one platform.
• Property valuation and analysis to estimate property value based on collected market, geospatial, and property data.
• Interactive dashboards to visualize data with charts, heat maps, and other visualizations.
• Geospatial analysis to analyze the trends in different areas and relationships between properties and amenities with spatial clustering, proximity analysis, and geographic overlays. 

The solutions we described above are just several examples of popular software options used by real estate companies. The significant benefit of custom real estate software development solutions is that you can create a solution that doesn’t have alternatives on the market and includes various features fully tailored to your needs.

Now that you know what options you have and what advantages they bring, it’s time to dive deeper into the peculiarities of the development process. How should you approach real estate solution development to succeed? Keep reading to find out.

Real estate software development process

In this section, we will walk you through all stages of real estate software development, explaining the essential steps you need to take to develop a solution in the most efficient way.

1. Conduct project discovery

Any project development should start with thorough preparation, and real estate software development is no exception. This stage is called project discovery and allows you to understand what exactly you should build, what features to include, what technologies to use, how much it will cost, and many other things.

How can you conduct project discovery? Here is the step-by-step guide:

Start with business and market analysis

Before building something, you need to make sure that it has a purpose. What problem are you trying to solve with custom software? Do you really need this solution for your business? Are there similar tools already on the market that you can use right away?

Business and market analysis can answer these and many other questions. If you develop software for internal use, examine your business processes, interview team members to understand what they struggle with, and identify problems you want to solve with new software.

If you want to build a solution and distribute it to external users, such as individuals and other real estate firms, focus on understanding their needs that can’t be effectively covered with existing solutions.

In both cases, make sure to analyze the market and identify potential competitors to avoid creating an identical product.

Decide on features and technologies

Once you identify problems you can solve with custom solutions, you can start to think about what functionality you need to cover users’ needs. Take a look at the features we listed earlier in this guide — some of them can match your solution idea.

When defining the functionality of your custom software development, you also need to consider what technologies to use. What programming language best suits building your solution? Using Javascript frameworks such as React for the front end and Node.js for the back end may be a great option, but they are not the only options. Choosing cloud computing services, integrations, and databases also requires your attention at this stage.

It’s better to involve technical specialists in this process to make the right choice. For example, you can consult with a CTO or involve your technical team if you have in-house expertise. 

Gather a development team

A skilled team is a key to success in software development, and we’re talking not only about developers. A real estate development team structure may be the following:

• Business analyst
• Project manager
• UI/UX designer
• Front- and back-end developers
• QA engineers

Your team structure can differ depending on your project specifics. For example, if you decide to follow software development trends in real estate and implement AI tools, you need to hire a developer with expertise in developing and integrating AI-powered solutions.

Another thing to consider at this stage is the cooperation model. You can gather an in-house team or outsource the process to a real estate software development agency. Hiring in-house is a great option if you prefer to have your team in close proximity, but be ready to invest time, money, and effort in the recruiting process, training, and onboarding.

Outsourcing, in turn, is a beneficial option if you don’t want to invest in hiring and training new employees but want to get a dedicated team with sufficient expertise in real estate software development for your project. In this way, you save time but get the same quality as with the in-house team.

Test your idea’s feasibility

To ensure that your idea can be technically implemented with the chosen tech stack, you can create a proof of concept (PoC) in the form of a piece of functionality or a pilot project. This step is optional but can greatly benefit your development process. With PoC, you can mitigate the risk of building a solution that won’t perform as you expect, and you can save yourself from investing in a project that will fail or lead to reworks.

Prepare documentation

After deciding on all the details of your project, you need to document everything. Functional and non-functional requirements, work breakdown structure, product architecture, and product roadmap are just several documents you will need to prepare.

Creating detailed documentation is essential for a smooth development process. It also helps estimate the cost and timeline of software development. That’s why we recommend involving the team you plan to work with in a project discovery process. They will help you with everything, from defining functionality and choosing tech stack to creating PoC, preparing documentation, and estimating cost and timeline.

2. Create a UI/UX design

A well-thought-out design is important for ensuring a great user experience and easy navigation within your software solution. Your UI/UX designer may create some wireframes during project discovery, but the goal of this stage is to implement the entire design and create an interactive prototype: designed screens of your solution that help to test the user flow and interface usability.

At this stage, it’s possible to capture inconsistencies in user flows, identify excessive or missing components, and redesign the app to provide a seamless user experience.

3. Develop and test your software

When design is ready, it’s time to move to the next stage: real estate software development. With the prepared mockups and project documentation, your developers can start to turn your product vision into the lines of code and, therefore, a functional solution.

When developing a custom solution, the most cost-effective approach is to start with a minimum viable product (MVP): a simple version of your solution with only core functionality. Why should you start with MVP? First of all, it helps you to develop and launch faster. In this way, you can get valuable feedback from users and identify issues that can’t be identified until launch. Then, you can continue product development with the users’ feedback in mind, increasing your chances of getting a high-quality product at the end and avoiding reworks.

Testing your MVP before launch is also critical. After each piece of functionality is ready, it should be tested individually and together with others. Testing helps ensure that your software meets all requirements and eliminates all significant issues before releasing it.

4. Deploy software and onboard users

When testing is finished, it’s time to deploy and release your software, making it available for users. If your product is for your internal team, you can prepare training and instructions to help them adopt new software faster.

If you create a product for external users, make sure to create a smooth onboarding process within your app with welcome pages and guides that introduce key features and ease new users’ navigation.

5. Monitor performance and collect feedback

Delivering a software solution to end users is not the end of your development journey. The first version of the software is rarely perfect. After deployment, you need to monitor your solution performance, listen to users’ feedback, and plan improvements based on what you discovered.

It’s not a stage you can neglect if you want high-quality software. We recommend you implement improvements and fix bugs quickly, and don’t be afraid to change some functionality if it turns out to be useless or too complex for users. After all, your goal is to make the software as user-friendly as possible so it can be effectively used to tackle business tasks.

AI Applications in Real Estate Software

Artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing the real estate industry, offering innovative solutions to streamline processes, enhance decision-making, and deliver immersive experiences. Here are three key applications of AI in real estate software:

AI-Powered Predictive Analytics

AI-driven predictive analytics empower real estate professionals to make data-driven decisions by analyzing vast amounts of market data, trends, and historical patterns. These tools forecast property values, rental yields, and market demand with remarkable accuracy, enabling investors, developers, and agents to identify lucrative opportunities, mitigate risks, and optimize their portfolios.

Example Software:

REalyse: Utilizes AI algorithms to analyze property data, market trends, and socioeconomic factors, providing actionable insights and predictive analytics for real estate investment decisions.

Remine: Leverages AI to deliver predictive analytics and intelligent prospecting tools for real estate agents, enabling them to identify potential sellers and buyers based on behavioral patterns and market trends.

AI-Driven Virtual Assistants

AI-powered virtual assistants revolutionize customer interactions, offering personalized support, instant responses, and efficient task automation. These assistants handle inquiries, schedule appointments, and provide tailored recommendations, enhancing customer satisfaction, and driving operational efficiency for real estate agencies and property management companies.

Example Software:

ChatGPT Real Estate Bot: Integrates AI-driven natural language processing to engage with clients, answer queries, and provide personalized property recommendations based on user preferences and requirements.

Zapier: Automates repetitive tasks and workflows by connecting various real estate software applications through AI-driven integrations, streamlining lead management, and enhancing operational efficiency.

AI Visualization Tools

AI-powered visualization tools revolutionize the creation of lifelike renderings, virtual tours, and immersive experiences for real estate marketing and design. These tools leverage advanced algorithms to enhance visualizations, simulate lighting conditions, and optimize rendering workflows, catering primarily to 3D rendering companies and architectural firms seeking to increase productivity and deliver captivating visualizations.

Example Software:

BoxBrownie: Utilizes AI technology to enhance property photos, create virtual staging, and generate floor plans, providing captivating visual representations of real estate listings.

NVIDIA Omniverse: Employs AI-powered rendering techniques to accelerate the creation of immersive virtual environments, enabling architects, designers, and developers to visualize and collaborate on projects in real-time.

Artificial Real: Offers AI-driven rendering services for architectural visualization, interior design, and virtual staging, delivering high-quality visualizations with unprecedented realism and efficiency.

Challenges in developing custom real estate software

Real estate software development has its challenges, and you should know about them in advance so you can find ways to mitigate them. Here, we describe four common challenges you can face in building a custom solution.

• Compliance with industry-specific standards. The real estate industry has various regulations and standards that you must take into account when building custom software. These regulations may impact your software requirements, so make sure that your team is aware of them.
• Wrong technology choice. Various programming languages, cloud services, databases, and other technologies are used for software development, and not all of them are suitable for the same purpose. Thus, choose your technology with your desired functionality in mind and involve the software architect and other technical specialists in the process to make the best technical decisions.
• Software adoption by your team. When you plan to implement new software into your business ecosystem, you need to prepare your team for it. Otherwise, implementation can result in decreased productivity and a low adoption rate, which definitely won’t benefit your business goals.
• Integration with existing software. Before starting development, you need to define with what other systems, including your existing software, you want to integrate with the new solution. Discuss it with your technical team to ensure smooth integration.

Conclusion

Building a custom real estate software can be the best way for your business to overcome operational challenges and achieve great productivity. However, to succeed with your product, you need to know the peculiarities of software development, choose the right features and tech stack, and know how to approach the development process to make it time- and cost-effective.

The best way to ensure smooth and successful development is to have the right people by your side. If you don’t have a technical team, you can leverage real estate software development services to have your product built by skilled specialists with knowledge of real estate software specifics. They will ensure that your solution adheres to industry-specific standards and includes everything needed to meet your business needs.