The A to Z of property apps: Part two
Games
While we’re passionate about property we do need to take a break now and then. We relish a bit of fun just as much as the next property nut. True to this spirit we found games with a property spin.
MyTown is a game that turns the real world in a monopoly board. Using the iPhone check-in system you can check-in into properties and decide if you want to buy them. Collect rent as more and more people visit the property. It’s really addictive. You can even make overseas investments as you build your digital empire. Plus it’s free.
Real Estate Rumble was created as a marketing tool for First National but it’s a fun little game. It’s simple but a good way to kill time waiting for the agent to turn up.
CommBank’s Investorville is a real estate investment simulator where potential property investors can get a feel for what the market is like without risking their own money. It takes real world information and brings it into the game to create a realistic investment environment. With each round of the game there are changes to both the market and your personal circumstances that you must take into account. Thankfully the game doesn’t run in real time and the years skip forward in seconds. Good fun and an easy way to get your head around property if you’re a first time investor.
Millionaire Tycoon is a popular game for iPhone users. Inspired by Monopoly this game takes the idea a whole lot further. It’s good fun if you don’t mind the super-kitsch graphics but it does get progressively harder.
Tiny Tower is a popular game where you build and manage a city tower. The 8-bit game lets you manage every aspect of your new building as you try and tempt new tenants and balanace the needs of everyone in the building.
Forget Angry Birds, Angry Buyers is essentially the same game but you get to load an estate agent, a property lawyer and a mortgage broker into a canon and fire them at shoddily built houses. Brilliant.
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House hunting
After looking at 16 houses on a home hunt they all start to blend into one another. One starts to forget just what exactly they were looking for and whether that Johnston Street property had two bathrooms, or was one just a toilet? You’re not alone in this frustration and a number of developers have stepped forward with various solutions for this problem.
Home Tracker is designed for people looking at multiple properties. It allows you to document each property in detail as you visit it as well as take photos, map properties and E-mail property information. It’s also useful for agents keeping track of multiple new properties. It has a niche and it serves it well. It costs $3.99 through the iTunes app store.
CrumbTracks is a similar offering to Home Tracker and is a perfect tool for people looking so many homes they lose track of them all. The app allows you to take photos and videos of properties you’re interested in.
House Hunter app helps keep track of properties viewed on a house hunt. It allows you to rate homes on various scales then filter them later through various features. Homes are rated for various attributes which you can prioritise based on your requirements and these are displayed on a scorecard. If your needs are so unique that are not included in their 80 options you can add them yourself. This gives you a quantitative data and keeps you true to your original goals in a house search. It comes with camera and GPS support.
Property Checklist – This is a similar idea to House Hunter with a somewhat simpler implementation. While it might not have the range of features available it is a little bit more intuitive to use, offering a simple yes/no checkbox system.
360 Panorama is an app for taking 360 degree panoramic photos of whatever you choose. This is ideal for agents showing properties to clients or for buyers capturing the whole detail of houses for later viewing. It’s not perfect and you’ll never get the results of a professional photographer but it does a very good job for a small cost of $0.99.
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Interior Design
You’ve bought that old crumbling warehouse and it’s time to renovate, but what look do you go for? Interior design takes a huge amount of creativity and there are tools out there to help get your creativity flowing.
Houzz – The days of ripping pages out of magazines to make an interior design ideas scrapbook are over. This app has thousands of photos of any aspect of interior design one can imagine. This may sound like a nightmare to navigate but the developers have made it incredibly easy to bring up photos of exactly what you are after. Design ideas are arranged by keywords and categories and allow you to quickly and easily view hundreds of interior design ideas to inspire the design of your own house.
Remodelista is a website of design ideas. There is post after post after post of beautiful content to get you thinking aesthetically. There are some really great ideas here, interspersed with a few naff ones.
Dulux My Colour app – Take a photo of any colour and find out what the Dulux paint code is. If you want to paint your house the exact same shade of beige as North Richmond train station, just take a photo of it with this app and it’ll tell you what tin of paint to get. It works pretty well, depending on the lighting.
Handy Man DIY – This app makes DIY projects much simpler. It helps you keep track of projects around a property, provides guides on how to do certain ventures and helps you calculate materials and costs for various the projects. It’s a simple interface, it makes perfect sense and it makes DIY projects that much easier.
This guide from LJ Hooker is a great way to get a quick overview to improve the look of your house and maximise selling price.
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Juwai
Juwai is an international property listing site that caters exclusively to Mandarin speakers. It’s just recently launched and has more than 1 million property listings from more than 80,000 agents and developers in the USA, Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and Japan. It also features guides on living and investing in Australia. It’s entirely in Mandarin and prices are displayed in local currency and Chinese Yuan.
Now it’s not the most beautiful website but the foreign investment review board site is required reading for foreign investors in Australia. It includes useful information and application forms for foreign investors.
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Know your agencies
It can be difficult to know which agency to go with when you’re looking to sell or rent your property. They all say they offer great deals and have the most experience in an area. It would be nice to be able to hear how other people found agents and perhaps read a couple of reviews.
Rate That Agent is a nice idea but it really lacks the user-base to make it a useful resource. The idea is that once you’ve dealt with a real estate agent, you log on to this website and give them a rating out of five plus a short review. These ratings are then used to rate agents and give sellers some sort of advice on which agents are worth their salt. It’s a nice idea but Property Observer struggled to find any reviews for any agents. It’s a catch-22 – to attract more users it needs a larger user-base.
Home Truth is another real estate agent rating site but it’s more focussed on renters. Again it suffers from the same problems - there is simply a dearth of reviews. Interestingly it does allow users to review rental properties as well. So on the odd chance someone has reviewed a house or an agent before you move in you can get some warning as to what to expect.
Product Review is a general review site that has a real estate section. Users reviewing agencies as opposed to individual agents which probably makes the website less prone to defamation law suits as well as a less aggressive atmosphere.
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Landlords and property managers
Landlords often wish to manage properties without the help of an agent. This requires keeping check on rent payments, managing multiple properties, recording communications, finding new tenants and possibly even writing your own contracts. It’s hard work and not necessarily advised but there are sites and apps out there to help.
Happy Inspector - This Australian made app is a simple way to do property inspections very quickly. It takes minimal set-up and allows you to run through properties and generate reports with ease. The software allows you to take photos of damage and keep notes on each property as well as track upcoming and previous inspections.
Inventory Pro is a similar offering that allows you to take inventories of entire apartment blocks if need be. It has a similar feature set but allows you to take videos as well.
Rent Monkey is a website that automatically creates rental agreements from a series of questions. It works for every state in Australia and is exceptionally simple to use. You should really get the documents sighted by a lawyer just to be on the safe side but it does make renting your own place out much easier. The packs they provide come with all the documents required for your state. So long as your needs aren’t too complicated this is a great website. The site also has an in-depth guide for each state on renting your house out with some solid advice.
Gumtree is a global online classified ad website with localised subsites. If you wish to eschew the whole real estate agency system you can list your own rental property. If you’re looking for a cheap rental property it’s worth having a look on Gumtree. It’s also a great tool for finding house-mates. Anyone can list for free so there’s plenty of options – some better than others. They’ve released an app with a strong function-set.
RentPost is an innovative piece of property management software. It’s a very easy way to keep track of rent payments, tenant history and property issues. The software works on iPads and iPhones so you can keep track of properties as you go. The cheapest license costs US$9 a month and allows you to track up to 10 properties. The online payment system is currently limited to the USA but there are plans to expand internationally in the second half of 2012.
RentingSmart looks like an exceptionally powerful tool geared towards self-managing landlords. RentingSmart will allow automatic rent payments with full integration with BPAY and bank transfers. They tell us it will help connect landlords with tenants and tradesmen, provide leases, keep track of maintenance issues, expense tracking, condition reports and all this will incorporated into an iPhone application. This could be the be all and end all for self-managing landlords.
Pocket Rent has the same idea but with more of a focus on recording communications with tenants. If you’re running multiple properties it can be a helpful tool to keep track of what issues have been raised which tenants.
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Mortgages
Visiting a mortgage broker office is a thing of the past with this range of mortgage tools. You can compare mortgage offerings from different banks, calculate loan repayments and see what you can afford.
Rate City allows you to compare home-loans. It stacks banks rates up against each other so you can choose the best value. The site also includes comparisons of savings accounts, credit cards and more so you don’t spend all your money before you even take a loan out.
Info Choice is have a similar tool that can compare different loan offerings online.
The ATO has a great tool for calculating how much you can afford to borrow It takes into account your financial situation and possible purchases to give you a realistic amount.
tapMortage is a simple app that allows you to calculate mortgage repayments, stamp duty and transfer fees within seconds. It’s perfect for showing clients how much a property will cost them or for working out if a property is within your budget. While not ground-breaking it is a genuinely useful tool.
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Neighbourhood
Moving to a new neighbourhood can be an exciting experience but it can take a long time to find out where things are. Where are the good cafes, where are the restaurants, where are the parks, what goes on around here and what’s the arts scene like? There’s no Lonely Planet for Doncaster East but we do have these multitude of resources to answer these questions.
You should never go to the supermarket on an empty stomach so why should property be any different. You can track down nearby eateries and read reviews to get a solid meal while you’re on the prowl or to work out what’s nearby a possible new home. Having no Thai joint within 2 kilometres could be a deal-breaker.
Around You is a good website for seeing what sort of events go on in areas. It really thrives with quite suburban suburbs with listings that inner-city publications just seem to miss.
Google Streetview is great if you can’t make it to the inspection and just want to have a sticky-beak online. Drive through the suburbs and see if it really is as leafy as the listing makes it sounds. It’s already on the iPhone accessible through the Maps application.
Urbanspoon.com is one of our favourite websites and apps we’ve used. It makes discovering places to eat incredibly easy. The user reviews are (usually) quite informative and their price guides are quite accurate. Their app is perfect and we love the idea of shaking the phone and being shown a random selection of nearby restaurants.
Broadsheet is a trendy website which covers the food, drinks and arts scene in Sydney and Melbourne. If you need a place to wine and dine someone or simply a place to eat lunch on the road this website is a treasure trove. They even run an app but it’s currently limited to Melbourne.
The Thousands are one of the main listings in various cities in Australia. They keep tabs of what’s happening in the arts scenes but we’re including it for its food directory. The app is a good resource for hip local eateries. It works in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth.
Art Guide Australia takes your current location and tells you what exhibitions are on around you. Great if you’re moving into an area with lots of galleries or if you want to see how artsy a new neighbourhood.
Wikihood takes your current location and draws a bunch of information from Wikipedia to create a little guide. It’s a great way to learn about a new city and see what’s what.
You can also read The A-Z of property apps: Part one.
