Responsive Website vs. Mobile App: Which is Best for Your Real Estate Business?

You’ve got a lot of options when it comes to real estate technology. Smart phones, lock boxes, e-signatures, drones – the list is extensive. What about your online presence?

Is a website enough or should you go with a mobile app?

Let’s take a look at a few realities of both to help you decide.

Mobile Apps Sound Cool

I’m not going to lie – people definitely use mobile apps. In fact, statistics show that people spend 52 percent of their digital life on mobile apps. For some industries, a mobile app is the smartest way to go (Candy Crush, I’m looking at you.)

As a real estate professional, think long and hard before you choose a mobile app.

You’ll have to spend time marketing your mobile app in order to convince people to download it. That’s time you could spend marketing your business or meeting with potential clients and customers.

You’ll spend money to create and design it. If you choose a free option – and they’re definitely out there – you’ll likely have to deal with their branding and the limitations of “free” anything. You know you get more when you pay for it, but do you really want to go that route when you may only get a few downloads?

A mobile app is another thing to update, worry about, and spend time on. Time is something you never have enough of.

Make It a Responsive Website

As of May 2015, Google reported that more searches done on mobile devices than on PCs and laptops. When someone does a real estate search and finds your website on their phone or tablet, what do they see?

Is the screen all tiny and scrunched? Are they doing the smartphone pinch of death to try and read it? If your website isn’t mobile responsive website, they are. These days, people don’t stay on a website they can’t read or is inconvenient to use – they have too many other options and websites to check out.

Mobile responsive websites are an affordable alternative to maintaining a mobile app. One website, one website design, one place to house your content, and it looks good on every device whether it’s a desktop from the early 2000s (do those things still work?) or the latest iPhone.

You’re already doing too much: updating Facebook, making a new video for YouTube, figuring out how to talk about the greatest features of a listing with only 140 characters, and still running your real estate business. A mobile app is just another thing to add to your already long list.

As a professional real estate agent, you’ve already got a website. You devote time and money to keeping it updated, full of great content, and making it a place potential leads can get good information and contact you. Make it a mobile responsive website, and you’ll catch all those searchers using their phone or tablet – without taking any extra steps or adding any more work to your already full schedule.