Putting rental property on the app

Realestate.co.nz chief executive Alistair Helm said the success of the initial app - which has been downloaded more than 35,000 times since its launch in November - prompted the company to develop a new version to display rental property.

"Up until now we've had around 100 downloads a day. It'll be interesting to see what effect the rental app has on that scale of download."

Helm said it was too early to comment on download numbers for the new app, but that its predecessor is one of the top 50 downloaded apps in the country and he saw no reason why the rental version would not be as successful.

He also said research into overseas property apps had convinced them to develop separate apps for sales and rental.

"A lot of the other apps we looked at you choose rental or sale in the property type when you're in a map, and we thought that's not really normal human behaviour, because you're either a renter or a buyer, so you might as well hit the button at the start and say I'm a renter and be looking at rental property."

Helm said that at present the app only displayed properties managed by property managers with subscriptions to the Realestate.co.nz website. He said while the app didn't have the ability to display listings for private landlords looking to rent property, that was a sector of the market he was interested in.

"As with everything on the web to be the most comprehensive is to be the most valuable so we'd like to have more content but at the moment we only have content funnelled through property managers."

He said one frustration is that as a geo-locational device, it is limited to properties where they know the address location.

"It's up to the property manager to say I want to display it with an address. Much as we've communicated to our customers that because it's now featured on an app which is location based you really need to think about putting an address, unfortunately a lot of them still don't want to."

He said at present of 7,200 properties only 4,200 have an address, though he expects this to change as the number of users of the app increases.

"One thing we found since we launched the app in November for residential sales is the percentage of property which is addressed has grown enormously."