June 11 2012
Showing Suite is a technology platform designed to help real estate agents automate many tasks related to home showings (and more), enabling them to spend more time on valuable sales and customer service activities. Like many companies, Showing Suite has recognized that agent productivity must be as effective on mobile devices as it is on a desktop computer. To this end, they offer a comprehensive mobile solution through any Web-connected mobile device and have recently released a native application for the iPhone.
If you have tried Showing Suite in the past, you will appreciate these new enhancements. If you have not considered Showing Suite before, you should contact them for a demo. Here is an overview of the Showing Suite mobile solution.
Showing Suite put together a nice video that gives a brief tour of their iPhone app.
With the Showing Suite iPhone app, you can:
When they set out to create a mobile solution, developers have several choices – they can either develop specific apps for each mobile device on the market ("native apps") or create a mobile website that can be accessed through any mobile browser (no matter what type of device is being used). In addition to the native iPhone app, Showing Suite has decided to create a mobile website that can be accessed with any Web-enabled mobile device. To explore this, we logged onto ShowingSuite.com from a Droid 2.
True to promise, it offered more than just the traditional Web view shrunk down to fit a smaller screen. In fact, it looked and felt similar to an app. We played around with the bulk of the functionality, and were able to quickly and easily accomplish what we set out to do. Still, we give the iPhone app higher marks, as it is (not surprisingly) slicker. This is not uncommon when a company builds a native application; it allows them to leverage each platform's strengths more effectively.
We were interested to note that Showing Suite's mobile site also offered the option to view the full website. We don't foresee any reason that someone would need to do this, but we have run into several situations with other websites where we were stuck with the mobile version and wished that we had access to the full Web version of the site.
There's a lot to like about the Showing Suite mobile app, but these are a few of the things that stood out to us the most.