Create a real estate app with Glide

What is it:

It's a Glide template allowing real estate agencies to display the apartments they're selling.

Maker Insight:

It is with this app that I really learnt how to use Glide. I played with some useful components to enhance the user experience: map, filter, add to favorites, etc.

What did I learn:

1. How do you capture value? When I interview Makers to help them with their projects, the number 1 problem I see is not a clear enough value creation and value capture mechanism within the experience. Why does this basic fundamental often get missed or is confusing? Often what happens is as a Maker you have the vision for your idea. The problem is you have so many ideas of what you want your product to do, you try to do too much. Instead of structuring your product to be simplified down to value created and value captured.

In this Real Estate App, the Maker Coralie uses a very visible and clear value capture mechanism with a button to send an email to schedule a visit for the apartment or condo. The button is clearly visible and is the only CTA on the page. With Glide you can configure this button to open the native email client on the device the user has. When I tried the feature it opened the default Mail feature on my MacBook desktop and it tried to open the default Mail feature on my iPhone. I was not able to confirm if there is a way to open it into other email clients.

2. Map feature within Glide adds a great visual to the content of your product and displays well natively inside Glide. When you click on the pin in the map it opened up the google maps on desktop. What's interesting is that on my iPhone it pulled into Apple Maps natively and not Google Maps.

3. Favorites feature within this experience. I thought there was a couple of missed opportunities using this feature. Favoriting is one of my favorite (no pun intended) features to use as a signal and as a trigger for user sign up. You know for sure that the user is getting value and would like to make an investment in your application to store more value. I would recommend that depending on your business goals, to use the favorite as a trigger for signing into the app. Then you will atleast capture more value. By now having the users email address. You can add a terms and conditions box within this user sign up process so they are aware that they are also signing up for emails if you decide to send them. Of course we discourage spamming or sharing users information but if you are running a business this is a massive opportunity for you to engage the user in a future sale.

Further, I only saw the favorite feature on one of the screens for the real estate assets. There were other screens where this feature could be used as a way to trigger a user sign up.

Of course this all matters to the Maker. But at the end of the day you have business goals, and if you don't meet those, its not fun for you or the users who need your solution.