 Personal Finance PowerPoint Presentation Best Home Buying Apps Get ready to get financially fit by practicing personal finance. Remember that financing decisions can basically be broken out into short term and long term decisions. The short term decisions being those that we're going to train our guts so we can trust our gut honing down our habits so that we can depend on our habits to make better short term decisions with less processing time. On the long term decisions those are the ones that we as human beings are not as good at doing often times. Those are the ones that we can't use tinkering trial and error to help with the decisions as much and therefore we need that more formal process for the decision making. Clearly the home purchase is going to be one of those long term items where you want a more formal process. You want to do the research. You want to follow the adage of measure twice and cut once. So the list of things that you might go through. Number one, determine the home ownership need. Number two, find and evaluate property to purchase. Number three, price the property. Number four, obtain financing. Number five, close the purchasing, the purchase transaction. We're going to be looking at the best home buying apps. Most of this information can be found at Investopedia which you can find online. Look at the references, resources and continue your research from there. This is by Brian Carmody, updated January 19, 2022. Obviously there's a lot more online resources these days and those online resources are evolving and changing every day. I think our capacity to be able to utilize and maximize the benefits of these online tools will depend in part on our personal characteristics and our experience. In other words, there's some things that we kind of feel naturally could move to an online setting. Most of us, for example, are pretty comfortable with the idea of research moving online and doing a research kind of thing online to be checking things out. Some people might be not quite as comfortable these days still with doing some types of shopping, possibly shopping for things like clothes online. We can't feel the clothes or buying food online. We can't actually look at the food that you are buying online. Although a lot of these things, many people are going to more online purchases with those types of items as well. Clearly with the home buying process, you've got a long process. You've got a list of different things where online applications could potentially fit into the process of the online process. Clearly they would most likely fit for most people's mind into the researching phase of things and they fit quite clearly there. But the question then would be what kind of applications are there? How in depth are those applications and what's going to be the optimal use when will those applications be utilized or useful within your kind of purchasing process, your particular needs? So shopping for a new home can be a challenging and time consuming endeavor. Driving to new neighborhoods and properties, touring homes and locating the nearby schools and supermarkets can feel like an additional part time job when you add house hunting to your busy life. So clearly it used to be obviously you do all the initial research would have to be pretty much on foot. You've got the location of the home and now you're going to go to the home and check it out. Hopefully and that would be if you are house hunting in the general area that you are at. Then you're going to have to research both the home, see what the home looks like, get a feel for the pictures of the home or a look of the home. What's the neighborhood and then you want to get a feel for the items around it that are going to be important to you. The neighborhood, the schools and the supermarkets and so on. Now that kind of stuff, the general map and the stuff that's around it is stuff that would naturally be able to be found online. What kind of schools are not around it? Not only what kind of schools, but what's the rating of those schools and you could dig into that quite deeply. But you can get the source point to start digging into those kind of things from these like one app these days for house hunting apps. They can kind of possibly branch out into other ones, which is nice. So homebuying apps can reduce and streamline this time investment considerably. You can search within the long list of what's for sale so that you only see the listing that fit your criteria. So clearly you can sort your list of criteria when you're looking for homes online. It used to be, you know, you look up what is online, it might take a little bit longer. You can search by criteria now, not just by the price possibly, but you can possibly search by the number of bedrooms, whether it's a condo or a home and that kind of stuff. From there, you start ruling out the ones you don't like until you have your short list. Then you can drive to visit just those homes so clearly you can narrow things down a lot more quickly these days and spend a lot less time driving around for those areas or for those items that you completely rule out. Clearly you might still want to, especially if the homes are in your particular area, drive by and check them out. It doesn't rule out that option for most people unless you're in some kind of home purchasing option possibly that's out of state or something like that. You're doing a remote purchase, but it can narrow that stuff down a lot. We reviewed 15 homebuying apps to find the ones that will serve you best. We made sure they were on both Apple and Android platforms that they were free and that they came highly rated by users. We wanted apps with the largest database of homes and we examined how well they mined the data and how frequently they updated the listing. But we recognize that when making a large purchase like buying a home, people often want to speak to a human being to answer questions and guide them through the process so we chose apps that connect you easily to knowledgeable agents. Here are our top choices. Now obviously when you're thinking about agent picking up an agent or something like that, I'm not sure that you want to do that possibly through an app or you might want to do the agent selection through other resources. When you're picking an agent like someone you know or something like that to help you with that decision making process. But the six best homebuying apps for 2022 that according to this, according to Investopedia, the best overall is Zillow. So you probably may have heard of the Zillow gives you the number one here for the overall kind of items. And again, it'll give you that kind of list to narrow down your search kind of options and then give you that information around it generally. Best for buying at auction. So buying at auction in particular XMO, X-O-M-E. That's the real estate auctions. Best search abilities for, so for search ability, Trulia. So you can take a look at Trulia. Best realtor options, the home snap. Best reliable realtor.com. So realtor.com. Best value, Redfin. So these are just some apps you can take a look at. You can take a look at all of them and get a feel for what you feel is the best application for them. We'll just go through a couple of them here, some of the top ones. So Zillow. So we chose Zillow as our best overall homebuying app because of its massive scope in inventory and services. The app also provides free foreclosure data, pre-approved assistance and customizable search filters. So that's always good information. And you know, you got the map on there. You want to be able to filter on the home purchasing and you can narrow down your search a lot. So Zillow works quite well with that. So the pros, users have access to over 135 million homes in participating markets. Zillow owned houses are unoccupied and can be toured by interested parties without an agent or without an appointment because the houses can be unlocked through the app, which is pretty neat, pretty snazzy. And detailed search and filter criteria. So the search tools are quite good on Zillow. Coordinate your search with a partner or roommate by tagging home features and sharing your favorites. So when you say we can filter options, then clearly you can filter by price. You can filter by things like the type of the home. You can filter by things like how many bedrooms, like the square footage of the home and so on and so forth. So you can get fairly detailed and in some specifics for the filters. So cons, the zestimate algorithm uses tax records to produce results which sometimes are inaccurate. So, you know, you got to deal with the records that are out there, but it's using the tax records. So that's what they're going to be based on properties feature several agents. Only one of these is the actual Lister. The others pay for a premium amount to be featured and are often uninformed about the property. So when you're looking up the actual agents there, then it might feel a little bit deceiving in terms of the agent that's actually familiar with that particular piece of property. Zillow was founded in 2006 by Rich Barton and Lloyd Frank, former Microsoft executives and founders of Expedia. They launched the online real estate service company Zillow.com in Seattle, Washington. Zillow's home buying app is the best tool overall because it has the largest database of at 135 million homes, a full site of search features nationwide and the ability to connect to agents for in-person service. Zillow serves the full life cycle of owning and living in a home, buying, selling, renting, financing, remodeling and more. It's all there on Zillow. Under the Zillow brand, Zillow runs Zillow. Zillow officers, Zillow premier agent, Zillow home loans, Zillow rentals, Zillow closing services, Zillow homes, truly out east, street east and hot pads. The Zillow app is available in the app store with a 4.8 out of 5 overall rating and in Google Play with a 4.4 overall rating. Reviews of the app for OIS and Android praise the tool's user friendliness. The app works on a database of more than 135 million U.S. homes, including homes for sale, for rent and those not currently on the market. The agent finder tool can help start the real estate agent search. You can search by location, home price, size and other features. The app regularly updates its database. Some minor changes made by sellers appear within a few minutes on the app, but all changes are updated within 24 hours. The next one is Zome, or X-O-M-E. We choose that one as our best app for buying a home at auction because of its easy user experience to view and bid on nationwide listings. So if you're on the auction kind of situation, this might be the one to go to. So detailed information like financing, property, neighborhood statistics, alerts when someone else bids on a property. You are watching and property price history all keep the bidder up to date on activity. Zome real estate auctions further suppresses its competitors with an efficient e-signing capability for contracts. So that e-signing thing obviously makes things a lot faster to process through the contracts. So the pros, one of the largest databases on auction properties, view pre-auction properties. The app has the same full site of features available on the website. Push notifications alert, you win and competitive bid appears. So you got those notifications that you could set up contract e-signing within the app cons. While the auction inventory is large, the app has relatively few views on both the Apple Store and the Google Play Store. Zome real estate auctions is a nationwide app based in Texas with offices in California. In addition, Zome has a variety of subsidiary companies and divisions that provide title service, mortgage solutions, field services, valuation, notary signings and more. Zome real estate auctions has one of the largest nationwide selections of REO short sale for closure and luxury properties for auction. The app allows a nationwide search of homes for sale with an easy user experience making it our top choice for buying a home at auction. The Zome real estate auctions app is available through both the app store and Google Play. On Google Play, it has an overall rating of four stars while the app store rates it with an overall rating of five stars. The app provides a user friendly interface and is free. Though it is free to register for an auction, interested buyers must agree to a $1,000 hold for every event they sign up for. If a buyer wins a property, Zome will add a quote buyer's premium in quote on top of the winner bid, which is either 5% of the winning bid or 2,500 whichever is greater. This will become the new purchase price for the property, not including closing costs. The buyer's premium is split as a commission between the seller's Zome agent and the buyer's realtor on Zome. This is different from the commission structure of a standard property sale wherein sellers are usually responsible for the paying all the realtor fees. After placing an order and receiving a confirmation email, Zome agent will call within one business day to coordinate the completion. Then we have Trulia is the next item we'll take a look at, the next app. We chose Trulia as our best home buying app in terms of searchability because it lets the user view a property in several ways. For instance, an individual can view the property itself, area crime information, shopping, eating establishments, schools, commute times, and review from community members. So the pros, Trulia app displays local info such as neighborhoods, schools, and shopping. So clearly that information can be important when you're doing your overall research. So in some cases you might be doing your research around a particular area that you know, you know what's around that area. But other times you don't know what quite is around that area and these are critical things that you're going to be wanting to dig into. What is more information on the neighborhood, the schools that are around there, there's a whole lot of other apps that you can take a look at to help to rank the schooling and then the shopping capacity, how far away are things, are they walkable, what's the location of the stores and so on. So the app notifications alert you to know homes added to the market that fit your criteria. The platform provides pre-qualified financing and calculators. You can draw with your finger on the map to customize your geographic search. There's a link to the listing agent in each property listing for direct contact. The cons, you got a complicated process to list for sale by owner properties. Users have complained about receiving notifications unrelated to their search. So the company was founded in 2005, was acquired by the Zillow Group in 2015 and is headquartered in San Francisco. The app is best for searchability because users can examine millions of listings nationwide using 34 neighborhood app overlays. These overlays provide users more insight into what it's like to live not only in that home but also in that neighborhood. Google Play rated Trulia at 4.6 out of 5 stars with nearly 210,000 reviews. On the app store Trulia has earned 4.8 stars with 1.1 million views. Since being acquired by Zillow in 2015, Trulia has accessed to most of Zillow's database of 135 million homes. To ensure consumers are viewing the best and most up-to-date information possible, Trulia processes more than 1.5 terabytes of data every single day giving it the required data for buyers to search better than on other apps. The data falls into two-core datasets listing and public records data and consumer behavior data. Like other home buying apps, Trulia gives home facts from public records. So public records obviously drive where they're drawn this information typically. So within just a few minutes of engagement on the app, users generate an average of 18 to 20 events or signals about their intent or preferences. Trulia processes these signals to serve custom content and drive engagement. Trulia shows names and contact information for listing agent so users know who they would be working with for each listing the app is free for users. And then we've got the next one which is Homesnap. Homesnap, we chose Homesnap as the home buying app with the best realtor option because realtor's teams and brokers can view production metrics, agent rankings, and reports. So the pros then access to highly credible listings due to MLS integration, extensive filters, helpful map overlays, and other options to find the perfect home high definition photos, which is nice cons. A lack of coverage in some areas as Homesnap must partner with individual MLSs. So the fact that they're partnering with the MLSs could give the pros and cons. The pro being access to highly credible listings, the cons being that because of that they might have less scope than involved. It seems to me that's my interpretation. Homesnap is a trusted home buying platform for people to explore homes, search listings, and collaborate right from their phone. The company is was bought by commercial real estate information provider Coaster in late 2020. Homesnap provides the best options for the realtor's because users can start accessing data backed prospecting tools, unparalleled client collaboration features, and a direct connection to their multiple listing service, the MLS real time data in one place. Homesnap is a free app available for Android and iOS. Homesnap has earned 4.8 stars overall in the app store with over 70,000 reviews and 4.5 stars overall rating in Google Play with over 7,000 views was abused reviews. So this app is powered by a specialized home database by integrating real time data from over 240 MLSs as well as property tax records, census data, geographic boundaries, property, polygon, polygons, school information, mortgage rates, and other real estate related information. The app claims a real time MLS update, which gives users access to new and updated listings before other apps do. With the find an agent feature, users can connect with their agent or with the agent who knows the most about the home they're interested in. Realtors use a similar version of the app with more enhanced features so they can message with their clients on the app and help them find the perfect home. The optional Homesnap Pro is designed to make it easier for real estate agents to work on the go by getting real time agent only MLS data into their hands for free as long as the agent is an active subscriber of a participating MLS. Realtor.com is the next one, Realtor.com. We chose Realtor.com as our most reliable home buying app because it is the official search portal for the National Association of Realtors. This is made possible by the closed relationship that Realtors have with the multiple listings service, which provides data feeds used by most home buying apps. With this relationship, Realtors.com is often updated a little faster with the Realtor driven information from the MLS. So the pros are going to be users can hide a listing from their search results, search other rentals in the same area with a touch of the button. Property listings include neighborhood noise level assessments, that's kind of interesting. Clicking on the quote contact agent end quote will not go to the listing agent, but instead a local agent who have paid for this lead service. So I'd always be a little bit careful on, you know, you know, selecting the agent there with the apps, but you can see the different apps might have different reliability on which agent you're, you know, you're going to go to. So Android users consistently experience glitches, which when using the Google Play app, founded in 1996, retail Realtor.com is currently owned by Move Incorporated, a branch of News Corporation in WS as of the News Corporation's most recent quarterly report. With the average monthly unique visitors on Realtors.com web and mobile sites were at 106 million Realtor.com has the most reliable app because of the influence and needs of the National Association of Realtors and because the data is bind from the MLS available for Android and iOS. This home buying app provides property listing sources directly from over 800 MLS is the data refreshes if every 15 minutes. It shows everything from detailed photos and properties details such as property tax and sales history combined with easy to use search options for investors and professionals alike. This app is always a top choice. The app gathers leads for those looking for a home and then forms them out to participating agents who are paying for that specific zip code. So again, be that that be careful on the agents that are going to involve there because obviously that's going to be part of their they're using the app to then kind of form out the to the to a particular agent. You might want to, you know, do some other method to find out your agent. So just be aware of that when you're obviously using these applications and Google Play over 260,000 users have rated the Realtor app with an average of 4.5 stars. Well, in the app store, it has an average rating of 4.7 stars after nearly 300,000 reviews. However, much like other apps, some updates have put off some users complaints are ranging from awkward navigation to difficulty in deleting listings. This app is free to use for home buyers.