RoofScout: Building a Real Estate App for Property Search

The brief: listings people can actually narrow down

RoofScout was built for a real estate company under NDA. Buyers and renters were browsing listings on a website that was hard to use on a phone, and scrolling through every property to find the few that matched their criteria.

The goal was a mobile app where people start with what they want - a type of home, a price, a location - see consistent, comparable listings, and keep track of the ones they like.

What the app does

• One-tap sign-in with Google.
• Search and filters on the home screen, including property types such as houses, condos, duplexes and studios.
• Featured listings and recommendations.
• Consistent listing cards: photo, name, address and price.
• Full property details: beds, baths, floor area, facilities, location on a map and the listing agent.
• Favourites and customisable profile settings.

Essential features of a real estate app

Property apps succeed or fail on a few fundamentals. Everything else - mortgage calculators, virtual tours, market reports - is secondary if these are not right.

Building search and filters that stay fast

Filtering on the phone works with a few dozen listings and falls apart with a few thousand. RoofScout runs search and filters as queries on the backend, returns results in pages, and loads more as the user scrolls, so the app stays fast however large the catalogue grows.

Property apps are also image-heavy. Lists use appropriately sized thumbnails and load images lazily, so scrolling stays smooth on lower-end Android phones, and full-size photos are fetched only on the details screen.

Secure accounts without a registration form

Saved properties and preferences need an account, but long sign-up forms lose people before they have seen a single listing. Google sign-in handles authentication in one tap, and favourites and profile settings are stored against that account so they follow the user across devices.

Design decisions

• Search sits at the top of the home screen, with property type filters directly beneath it.
• Listing cards follow one layout, so price and location are always in the same place.
• The details screen leads with the photo and the numbers buyers check first: beds, baths and floor area.
• Agent contact and price stay visible at the bottom of the details screen, so the next step is always one tap away.

More on the principles behind these choices in mobile app UI/UX design.

What we would do differently

We would include saved-search alerts in the first release - a push notification when a new listing matches what someone is looking for. It is the feature that brings house hunters back to the app instead of to a competitor, and it is simpler to design in from the start than to add later.

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