Go House-Shopping on Your Smartphone

Remember the good old days, when you'd drive through neighborhood after neighborhood looking for homes that were for sale, and once you spotted a sign, you'd run up to the brochure box on the sign to grab a flyer to see how much they were asking, only to find the brochure box was empty? Well, we've come a long way baby.

The use of smartphones has grown exponentially over the past couple years, and with it, their increased ability to provide countless applications. When searching for a home, there's applications ranging from mortgage calculators to apps that let you search homes for sale. Taking that computing power in the palm of your hands and intergrating it with the phone's GPS system and the available property databases and you have a killer app that puts your home search on steroids.

Whether you have an iPhone, Android or Blackerry, "there's an app for that." A great app offered by the National Association of Realtors and Realtor.com provides essentially every property listed for sale in the U.S. and is in a very easy-to-use format. There's also apps offered by third-party companies such as Trulia and Zillow, which are also great apps, but may not include all listings, since they only post the ones agents or sellers post to their sites.

The cool thing about these apps is that by activating the GPS on you phone with the application it uses your location and finds the properties for sale nearest to you and provides a map with pins showing where the properties are located for sale. Once you click on them, you get all the info on your device and can even have the phone give you directions to the home. It's so cool and super easy to use.

Of course most would think that this is strictly geared toward home buyers, but wait a second, many of the apps also offer sold comps from the last six to 12 months, so as a home seller, you could do your very own market analysis from your kitchen table. Pretty cool, huh?

If you're concerned about using up storage space on your phone with an app, try my mobile website that accomplishes the sames funcionality, without taking up precious storage space on your phone. With this site, you can search homes for sale and recently sold within the Twin Cities and Western Wisconsin Region. (Quick tip sheet)

Although very fun to play around with, these apps are very useful and can save you a ton of time and money instead of driving around looking for for-sale signs.