Annually, real estate industry generates billions of dollars of revenue. This is one of the industries that hold their positions even if the world economy faces troubles. Nevertheless, one of the main features of the real estate industry is that it is cyclical. Let’s take a look at its development over the last 100 years. The World War I and II caused a considerable decrease in the financial growth of the industry. In the 1950s, real estate made a great step towards the improvement together with the general social and economic development at that time. The depression of the 1980s made a negative impact on the industry and for almost 20 years no significant progress has been noticed.

Our century brought innovations and changes. The main reason for these changes is the incredible development of the IT industry that made a priceless contribution to the world as we know it.

Real estate industry is no exception. Success and business improvement are possible only if you use the proper software. The solution for your business has to reflect modern tendencies and industry specifics, as well as to be suitable for your agency, meet your specific needs and requirements.

The ready-made platforms on the market are barely relevant for the specifics and peculiarities of your business. They are more like “all-in-one” solutions to satisfy the basic needs of every company. On the other hand, custom real estate development is a time-consuming and complex task. So, we prepared an informative review of custom vs third-party real estate app. Find out about main pros and cons of each option and make the best choice for your business.

Third-Party vs Custom Real Estate Platform: Why You Need It

The very first step to solve the task is to understand it. In our case, the first step to pick a better real estate software solution is to understand what it is and why your business needs it.

One of the best ways to drive up your business efficiency is to bring it to the Internet. Actually, every successful entrepreneur has reached the current success and fame only because of the World Wide Web. Internet marketing and promoting on the company website, blog, and pages on social media are able to blow up your profits. Just open your Instagram: popular bloggers can draw the attention of their 200,000 followers to your business profile within a 15-second story! Probably, it may sound ridiculous. Probably, some old-school entrepreneurs are not used to it yet. But this is what our reality looks like. If you do not have a powerful software tool to support you, your chances to succeed slowly die.

A real estate software solution is a tool for promoting your business, presenting the items, communicating with partners, tenants and landlords. In essence, a real estate app is a combination of a convenient CRM system with an agency website. Real estate extensions will provide you with the ability to integrate the solution with other web apps and social media and increase the number of visitors and potential clients.

The solutions of this type should demonstrate good performance and nice functionality. The more powerful tool you use, the more processes are optimized. Routine work is done within seconds. In such a way, your real estate agents and managers save their time and get the opportunity to concentrate their attention and devote their professional skills to more important things or issues.

Of course, the contemporary IT market offers you a lot of solutions that allow managing your data separately. We would not be surprised if you use a special CRM to track the information about your customers and Google Docs and paper notebooks to record the information about tenants. No doubt, it is a common practice, and it may even seem quite convenient for those who have used such “tools” for ages. However, the opportunity to keep all significant data, manage processes, control financial transactions, communicate with clients, partners, and coworkers, all in one place, is definitely attractive. Furthermore, if your agency consists of more than one person, it may be difficult to coordinate the work, assign the tasks and get the whole picture of the results achieved. This is another reason why you will find a real estate software platform helpful.

As you can see, your business needs a high-quality software support if you have the ambitions to grow and improve. The only question we have not answered yet is 3rd party vs custom real estate app: what to choose?

Third-Party vs Custom Real Estate Platform for Your Business

Real estate agents face hundreds of troubles a day. Never-ending dialogues with clients, payrolls, content publishing on social media, and different deals with tenants are sometimes really hard to handle. There are two options that come to mind:

to pick a third-party platform as a software assistance for your real estate business,

to hire software development specialists to create a custom application for your enterprise.

Let’s make the key definitions of this topic clear to ensure we are on the same page:

A third-party platform is a software solution developed for the needs of a particular industry. It can demonstrate basic features and provide general opportunities, but not caters to your particular wishes.

is a software solution developed for the needs of a particular industry. It can demonstrate basic features and provide general opportunities, but not caters to your particular wishes. A custom app is a solution developed for a single company or organization specifically. The real estate platform development is performed according to customer’s needs from scratch.

For example, we can consider Facebook as a third-party website. It provides different web stores with the opportunity to sell their products on Facebook. On the other hand, Asos website was developed as an e-commerce solution for the needs of Asos company. No other companies or brands are able to add their items to the Asos website. How do you think, which way of online retail is more profitable for business owners? Of course, there are more than 2 million active users on Facebook. However, Asos website is a more trustable and informative source of information about Asos products; it represents the company culture and brand itself. So, a shopper would rather choose to buy from a custom website.

Custom apps rule, but no doubts, both options may be good and potentially profitable for your business. The final result of these ideas implementation is a tool that improves the processes and communication inside and outside of the team.

So, to dive deeper into the topic, let’s take a look at the comparison of the disadvantages that come with these two options.

Third-Party Software: Pitfalls to Be Aware of

Another Choice to Make

The aim of this article is to lead you to the right choice for your business. If after reading it you will be ready to switch to the third-party software, get ready for another great task. The number of commercial off-the-shelf real estate platforms is big. So, it’s a great challenge to pick a seamlessly working one after only looking at templates.

Installation Troubles

Most 3rd-party platforms are accompanied by the ultimate guides. However, those guides are sometimes so poor and helpless that one more employee needs to be hired to handle the installation, integration and further support of the ready-made solution.

Lack of Guarantee

Even if you have successfully found the perfect platform, set it up, integrated it into your business and started to enjoy it, you never know who is responsible for the support of the whole platform. You never know if it will work well tomorrow. Using the third-party software always means taking some risks.

The next step is to consider custom real estate platform development disadvantages.

Custom App: Pitfalls to Be Aware of

Time-Consuming Process

The development of a custom app is a process that consists of different stages. First of all, you need to find a development team that is ready to bring your idea to life. So, the solution will be ready only a few weeks or even months after you decide to opt for the custom development option.

(Not?) Reliable Partner

As it was mentioned above, it is highly important to choose the right software development company to build a solution for you.

Higher Expenses

Usually, a third-party app requires a fee to be paid each month when you use it. A custom app costs more, but after the launch, you do not have to spend money on it at all.

Read more: Types of Real Estate Software

Third-Party vs Custom Real Estate Platform: the Summary

Both a third-party platform and a custom app can bring benefits to your business. Both of them are used by real estate agencies worldwide and both have their pros and cons. The main advantage of those tools is a positive impact on your organization management.

In case of a third party platform, it is really challenging to find a high-quality one, and it may be hard to install and support. Additionally, it is always risky to entrust clients’ personal information, credentials or transactions details to a third party. Moreover, this type of solution will never cater to your needs completely.

On the other hand, custom real estate development is a challenge as well. You need to be ready to spend your time and money to get an impeccable solution. However, you have just got one step closer to your success having visited our website. Our team is ready to start designing a super-functional, useful and convenient custom tool for you as soon as you contact us. So, forget about hesitations and make your business better today.