One of New Zealand’s largest real-estate valuation and property services company offers professional valuation and property information services across residential, rural, government and commercial sector.The company also offers a service to citizens for searching for a house. The company’s management wanted to offer additional convenience to their customers by providing real-time property information on their mobile device. The management team decided to build a mobile application which can show interested partiesthe most updated information for a property of their choice using Augmented Reality (AR) by just opening up the camera from the app and pointing the phone in the direction of the locationor property of interest.The solution was envisioned to provide all the information related to a property such as current availability status (vacant or sold-out), asking price or estimated value of the property, status of amenities and more. The company wanted to roll out the mobile application on iOS quickly in order to capture the market and ride on the huge wave of demandfor such a service. As house-search is an importantline of business for the company, they wanted to offerthe best service with state-of-the-art user experienceover a free mobile app.
The Vatsa Solution: Mobile application with rich user experience for real-time property search
Vatsa worked closely with the company’s management to build mobile application that provided real-time visibility into properties and locations. Vatsa brought their vast experience in building intuitive mobile applications into the project. Beyond the mobile application with all the information and features, what made the house hunting exercise truly exciting was an innovation that Vatsa brought by the use of AR. Using the app, users can visit any location and use their camera from within the app and point the phone towards the property they are interested in. The AR engine behind performs real-time search for properties available on rent or sale around that vicinity andoffers a lot of information specific to that property and locality.The app overlays that information onto the live camera view for the user to evaluate and take informed decisions. In addition to property details, the application offers information on the demographics in every suburb, school zones, and sales metrics for that area.
Vatsa used the iOS map kit for integrating the Google mobile map service to provide map data. Vatsa also prepared the UI elements, screens, components and app concepts using iOS app kit. Lastly, Vatsa built in-app purchase functionality for more detailed information such as land value, building age, floor area, natural hazards and title details.
Results:
Vatsa brought a lot of value to the mobile application with their extensive expertise in advanced capabilities. The use of AR was a critical part of the overall solution, and Vatsa’s capability in this area resulted in a long-term relationship with the customer. The solution was delivered within a few weeks with many benefits that included:
1) The user could get a quick digital walkthrough of nearby properties, vastly reducing the time-to-decision in their otherwise busy lives
2) New exciting visual experience for buyers that served to delight and engage them, resulting in app’s huge virality and spread through word of mouth
3) The company could convert prospective buyers into customers at a much faster clip than before
4) With AR, the real-estate company was able to scale new heights in creating a highly convenient and innovative user experience
Technology and Tools:
