A Real-Estate App When You're Buying or Just Nosy

Wall Street Journal - ‎‎May 9, 2012 [wsj.com]

Let's say you're walking around your neighborhood, or a neighborhood you'd like to make yours, and you spy a house you find interesting. Even if it isn't for sale, you can just whip out your iPhone, take a picture of the home and in less than a minute, you'll have an estimate of its price, plus details on its square footage, number of rooms, and similar homes for sale. It even gives you the ratings of local schools .

If a home isn't for sale, HomeSnap draws its information from public information like tax records, school boundaries, and census data. If a home is for sale, it provides much more detailed information drawn from local listing databases, including interior photos and bid history.

This feat of digital magic, which works all over the country, is performed by a new, free app called HomeSnap, from a Washington, D.C., online real-estate firm, Sawbuck Realty. Despite its parentage, the company says that using the app doesn't send any data to a Realtor, or invite any calls or emails from one—unless you explicitly ask for such a connection.

You can use the app to flip through Snaps taken by others, either in nearby areas or around the nation. (HomeSnap allows you to keep your own Snaps out of this "stream," if you'd rather your neighbors don't know you've been investigating their homes or you'd rather not tip off potential competing buyers.)

I've been testing HomeSnap for a few weeks in two states: Maryland and Rhode Island. In my 17 attempts, the app almost always correctly identified the house I was shooting. In two cases, both in town-house complexes, it wasn't sure and presented me with an aerial photo displaying a few guesses from which I could pick. In two other cases, it couldn't identify the house at all for some reason.

The app uses the iPhone's GPS capability and its sensors to identify the house and then fetches the details from a server in the cloud.