Four Students Build Popular Real Estate iPhone App
Beginning as a class assignment, leading to a contest entry and finally being developed as an iPhone application, four students from the University of Missouri created NearBuy, a real estate search tool that looks for for-sale properties, according to a recent Inman News report.
As one of the first real estate applications to map multiple properties in its initial search results, it has been downloaded about 100,000 times.
The four college students pulled the national property listings data from Craigslist, Oodle and Google Base through their free application programming interfaces or APIs.
“We did look into finding a way to pull (multiple listing service) listings … since (the data) tends to be more reliable. But because (MLSs are) so closed and expensive to be a part of, we thought it would not be in our best interest,” Anthony Brown, one of the creators, told Inman News.
This tool also provides demographic information, allows users to contact a listing agent in two taps and lets users share listings through Facebook, Twitter or email.
The application was completed in March 2009 and the team launched a rental search application, “Apartment Search- NearBuy”, three weeks later.
—Kimberly Turner
