Just ahead of the spring house hunting season, the online real estate service Trulia today launched a major redesign of its flagship mobile apps for iOS and Android.
The new design puts real estate photos at the center of the experience. The design team also moved to a flat look on both platforms and simplified the user experience to make things like saving houses significantly easier. In addition, the new apps make it easier to get information about neighborhoods (school, crime statistics, etc.).
Talk to anybody in the online real estate business and they will all tell you how important mobile has become to them. The last company to join the fray was Estately, which launched its first mobile app a few weeks ago, but Trulia had long been on mobile before today’s relaunch. Being on mobile early also clearly paid off for the company. According to Steven Yarger, Trulia’s director of mobile, the service now has more users on mobile than on the desktop, and over 60 percent of the company’s leads to real estate agents now come from mobile. The company currently sees over 14 million monthly unique visitors to its mobile properties.
It took Trulia quite a while to launch this update, given that iOS 7 has been out for quite a while, but Yarger argues that the company wanted to wait a bit to launch this new version in order to learn from what others were doing. For the first time ever, Trulia also wanted to launch both its new Android and iOS apps simultaneously. In addition, he noted that the house hunting season is only now heating up, so there wasn’t all that much rush to get these new versions out.
Besides its flagship real estate apps, Trulia also offers apps for renters and real estate agents, as well as a mortgage app. All of these will be updated to the new look in the near future.