How To Build A Website Like Zillow In 2023?
Do you know Zillow had 335.3 million visitors in June 2023? Would you rather consult a real estate website or engage a real estate agent when looking to buy or rent a home? To save time and have access to a wide range of possibilities, the majority of us like using real estate websites to search for a house.
Zillow the most well-liked real estate and rental website in the US, is a good palace to start your search. To help people buy and sell real estate professionals, buyers, and sellers.
Here is the content of the blog:-
- What Is Zillow?
- What Are Zillow’s Revenue Streams?
- Essential Real State App Features.
- Cost Of Creating A Website Like Zillow.
- How May Appic Softwares Be Used To Create A Real Estate Marketplace?
What Is Zillow?
Since its revenue model involves running advertisements and encouraging brokers and agents, Zillow has evolved into more than just a website for displaying properties. “We are a media company”, as Zillow Group CEO Spencer Rascoff states.
What Are Zillow’s Revenue Streams?
Zillow offers consumers the following advertising services so that they can make money:
For real estate agents that pay the website to post advertisements and receive leads, premier services are available. Agent fees include:
- Cost per ad impression, or the price for every 1000 views of an ad.
- Lead prices range from $20 to $60.
Selling advertisements targeted at real estate firms. AOL Real Estate, Trulia, MyNewPlace, Yahoo! Inc., Hotpads, and MSN Real Estate websites are all part of the Zillow Rental Network, and the website charges property management businesses cost per lead, cost per click, and cost per lease for placing ads there.
Selling advertising space to lenders, mortgage industry experts, and other companies is part of the advertisement sales paradigm. Cost per lead fees are assessed by the platform.
Subscription-based mortgage services, which connect specialized quote services and lead management platforms via the Internet.
Simply said, by uniting agents, buyers, investors, and house builders, Zillow has developed into the best real estate platform in the US. The website has special functions and resources that aid homebuyers in finding the ideal residence and real estate brokers in promoting their businesses.
Let’s now get started on building a real estate website.
Essential Real State App Features
As we can see, Zillow is the market leader that everyone else is attempting to overtake. But without going bankrupt, it is nearly difficult to match Zillow’s feature set. Zillow reportedly spent $20.8 million on technology in 2018 alone, according to an Aberdeen analysis. As a result, we provide you with the option to create your real estate website on your terms. For a real estate listing website MVP that will save time and money, we have compiled the necessary characteristics below:-
Property Listings And Databases
Property databases are a crucial component of the real estate market. The web development team will include your real estate agency’s existing database of properties in your city, region, or nation into the back end of the website if it exists. If you don’t have a database, then what you should do? Let’s investigate.
If you wish to create a real estate marketplace in the United States, you can take the lead from Zillow and incorporate data from:
- Multiple Listing Service (MLS)
- (NAR)The National Association Of Realtors.
API Zillow
You can access homes listed for sale by integrating the Zillow API onto your website. Zillow data and the API Terms of Use state that the company permits website integration of its API, but not mobile app integration.
Owners’ posts
Landlords may post information about their properties up for sale as you’ll be creating a two-sided marketplace.
platforms for syndicating listings
With one of the major national real estate firms, you can negotiate a data-sharing agreement and offer their properties on your marketplace. You can select one of the following real estate platforms to accomplish that:-
- 365 Connect is a technological company that serves the housing market.
- The platform for marketing mobile and social listings from RealBird
- JBGoodwin Realtors is a real estate brokerage marketplace.
Filtering Methods
Your marketplace needs to have a filtering mechanism to make it easier for consumers to find the property they’re looking for. We advise you to take into account the following search criteria:-
- Location
- Cost
Type
- Area
- Number Of Bedrooms
- Floor etc.
Geolocation And Map-Making
Users of your marketplace will want to research the area they are going to in advance. To achieve this, you can combine the Zillow API’s neighborhood boundaries with several other APIs that offer geographic and neighborhood data, such as:
- The dataset GeoNames, which contains more than 10 million place names,
- Information about nearby establishments, including restaurants, sports clubs, and supermarkets, is available via the Google Places API.
- Use MapBox to create a bespoke map with real estate listings, market information, videos, and pictures. Users of this application can also draw a polygon on the map to improve search results.
Property View
For real estate websites like Zillow, one of the crucial features is a detailed portrayal of the property. You can use the following to demonstrate to website visitors how well real estate objects are visualized:
The Cloud’s Infrastructure
Your real estate marketplace will likely contain a sizable number of high-quality images, videos, and possibly 360-degree panoramas. To maintain all this data, you will require robust hosting.
The best course of action in this situation is to incorporate a cloud-based architecture from the start, as Zillow did. Zillow uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to store 300 million pictures, 1 billion objects, and more than 100 terabytes of data. With a conventional file system, keeping track of billions of objects is challenging. It would be a management headache to spread those things across numerous file systems. Nick Michal, manager of Unix systems engineering for Zillow Group, believes that the scalability of Amazon S3 “seemed like the right technology for us.
Cost Of Creating A Website Like Zillow
The creation of a real estate website is a challenging task due to the integration of APIs as well as the inclusion of various user roles, including buyers, sellers, and administrators. As a result, your real estate website should be designed with three user groups in mind. We advise launching projects like an MVP, a website with only the essential functionality, to save you time and money. You can ascertain whether or not your business idea has the potential to be profitable in this way. The essential components for creating a real estate website MVP are listed below.
| Feature\Screen | Functions required | FrontEnd | BackEnd |
| Architecture/DB | 16 hours | 40 hours | |
| Design | 450 hours | ||
| Deployment | 40 hours | ||
| User interface | |||
| Home page | – Search by the address | 24 hours | 24 hours |
| Menu bar | – Menu options | 8 hours | |
| Registration | – Account creation
– Registration |
16 hours | 16 hours |
| Login | – Login by Facebook, Google
– Restore password |
8 hours | 20 hours |
| Search Results | – List of properties with images | 24 hours | 8 hours |
| Search filter | – Filters for renting, buying, and budgeting; | 16 hours | 16 hours |
| Map for search results | – Google Map API integration
– Define the user’s location |
16 hours | 8 hours |
| Listing information about house/property | – Fill in the information about the property
– Insert images |
16 hours | 16 hours |
| Applications for listed property | – Application details for listed properties | 16 hours | |
| Property page | – Information (static)
– Features (static) |
24 hours | 8 hours |
| Maps directions | – Property directions (available to authorized users only) | ||
| Static pages( About us, help) | – Static text (not editable) | 32 hours | |
| System rules, authority rules | Authorised users and those who do not have distinct | ||
| User account/profile | – Edit profile, account
– User settings – Applications |
16 hours | 40 hours |
| Real Estate Agent interface | |||
| Log In | – Login, logout, password recovery
– Account creation |
8 hours | 20 hours |
| Home page | – List of requests from users | 24 hours | 4 hours |
| Requests | – Requests details
– Requests from consumers |
24 hours | 20 hours |
| User account/profile | – Edit profile, account, and settings | 16 hours | 8 hours |
| Contact Us | – Static text (not editable) | 32 hours | |
| Admin Panel | |||
| Admin Login | – Login | 4 hours | |
| List of users | – Manage the list of users
– Manage user information |
16 hours | |
| Property List | – Review the list of properties | 4 hours | |
| Property page | – Review information about properties | 20 hours | |
| Total | Front-end from 786+ hours | Back-end from 332+ hours |
How May Appic Softwares Be Used To Create A Real Estate Marketplace?
We will begin the discovery (inception) phase before we begin building a real estate website MVP to investigate and develop the project concept. Additionally, we will outline the project’s parameters and potential solutions that could be used. Identification of the project’s scope, needs, and the creation of an Inception Technical Documentation, which may cost as much as $4000, are the key objectives of the inspection phase.
The team will then create a set of needs for MVP (Minimum Viable Product) features in the form of User Stories using technical documentation. By dividing User Stories into Use Cases, the business analyst will clarify them. She will also look into and analyze any system integrations with third parties. The future MVP server architecture will then begin to be planned and projected. Our team will begin the MVP development stage as soon as all of these documents are complete.
It would cost between $10,000 and $80,000 to build a real estate website with an integrated calendar, payment gateway, and other bells and whistles.
The prices to create a real estate app similar to Zillow, however, are merely an approximation because the actual cost of the real estate website will depend on its features and requirements.
Conclusion
Now, in the end, we hope that through this post you were able to gain knowledge on how you can get your app similar to Zillow developed.
However, if you are looking for a real estate app development company that can help you build a website and app similar to Zillow then you must check out Appic Softwares. We have previously created several real estate applications and can also use VR/AR technology for your app.
So, what are you waiting for?
