Even my grandfather realizes that mobile is the next big thing on the Internet. And mobile makes even more sense for real estate than many other industries; to look for a new home, at some point you have to leave the house. During the second half of 2009, we thought about how Sawbuck should do mobile.
The obvious play was an iPhone app. I have an iPhone, my wife has an iPhone, my Dad and brother have iPhones—and we love them (OK, my wife doesn’t love hers, but that’s because she still has the original model—no 3G or GPS, and pretty slow). But in looking at our stats, and the way people come to our site now, we didn’t feel that was the place to start (though it will still happen down the road). Instead, we created a location-aware mobile web site, which we released about a week ago. Here are a few reasons why:
- Our “regular” site is not great on a mobile phone, even a smartphone. We do a lot of AJAX, use Google Maps, and really take advantage of the large screen size of a desktop computer. This makes it slow to load on a phone, even with a 3G connection, and hard to use—it’s just not built for a small browser.
- Most people find our site by clicking a link from someplace else—often a search result on Google. If they are mobile, we want the first page they see to load fast, look good, and give them the answers they seek (which is why they clicked on the link in the first place). Even for iPhone users, having a page that says “download our iPhone app” is not a great answer—you haven’t yet shown them that you have information/functionality worthy of installing an dedicated app, and it can take a long time to download, even on 3G.
- When driving around, many home shoppers Google the address of a home they are looking at on their phone. Our site often comes up high in these search results, and those users don’t want to install an app—they just want to know how much this houses costs, how many full baths it has and what it looks like inside. We want to give them that information with one click.
- Stopping what you are doing in your browser and switching to an app can be annoying. When we do launch an iPhone (or Android) app, we want using it to be a choice—not the only way to interact with Sawbuck on your phone.
- There are an increasing number of people with smartphones that aren’t iPhones, including Blackberries, and especially Android. These devices have GPS and advanced (WebKit) browsers. We wanted to serve these users as well.
- In recent months, the web broswers on iPhone, Android and (many) Blackberries added the ability to tap into the user’s location. Previously, this was only possible in an app. This allowed us in include location-based functionality (homes for sale near me, open houses near me, etc.) in a mobile web site.
Our solution was to launch a location-aware mobile web site designed primarily for newer smartphones with GPS and more advanced web browsers. Now, if you visit Sawbuck with a mobile phone, you’ll go to this new mobile site at m.sawbuck.com.
As with many developing technologies, there have been some hiccups. Just like it is hard to make an advanced web site that also looks good on Internet Explorer 4.0, it is hard to build an advanced mobile web site that still looks good on your Motorola RAZR. Really, you would have to build a third version of the site that is just simple text and text links. Our stats show that we don’t get a lot of traffic from these older phones—but I’m sure the few people that use them are not impressed.
Also, the way each device allows interaction between a web site and the phone’s GPS is different. There are at least seven different flavors—iPhone has one way, Android has another, Blackberry has several. We did our best to find devices that use each of these methods and test, but we obviously didn’t do enough.
One of our favorite real estate reporters, from the Washington Post, had trouble using the GPS part of the mobile site on the day of our launch—and said so in her column. She uses a Blackberry Curve—which has some newer features (GPS), but an older browser. Of course this was not a phone we had tested with, and we all felt deflated when her post went up.
We went back to improve the Blackberry GPS code, and add better error handling, but I’m sure there are still combinations of Blackberry hardware/browser that will give the mobile site trouble. I think over time, more iPhones and Androids will replace RAZRs; and Blackberry seems to be moving towards more standards in their newer phones. As things evolve, we will do our best to make the mobile site work well for as many people as possible.
And, when the time is right, we’ll release our dedicated iPhone and Android apps.
Let me know what your experiences with the mobile Internet are. What phone do you have? What sites work well on it? What sites work poorly? How does our mobile site work for you? Did we make the right choice?