Free Real Estate App For Windows 8 And 8.1: Zillow

Zillow is a free real estate app for Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 that allows you to search real estate at your own convenience. The app upon launch will ask for location access, and once granted, it will show you all the homes available for rent and sale towards the right side of the screen, and these houses will be marked as red dots on the map of the screen. You can view details about a particular property by either clicking on its icon at the right side of the screen, or by clicking on its location marker on the map. Performing either of these actions will bring up the details of the property on the right side of the screen, along with an image of the same.

Zillow is a really cool app and it can save you a lot of time and money while searching for homes, as you can easily look up for properties at the convenience of your home without having to bother about going through a broker or a property agent. It’s easy to contact the owner through Zillow, and the large list of houses makes sure that you will definitely find the home of your choice. Let’s read more about this app in detail now.

Zillow

Features and Working of Zillow…

When you launch Zillow on your Windows 8 or Windows 8.1 device, you will be presented with a screen where the app will ask you for location access. After you have granted the app permission to access your location, you will be taken to the map screen where you will easily be able to see the list of homes available for rent or for sale on the right, and you can also see the location markers for various houses on the map itself.

Zillow - Search Results

As you can see in the above screen, the red dots are the available homes. The small text next to the homes like 400K, 60K, etc., is the price for which the houses are going for sale or for rent. The red dots show the houses available for sale, the purple ones show the houses available for rent and the the blue ones are the pre-market prices of the houses yet to be built. Let’s click on a location marker and see what happens.

Zillow - Property Details

As you can see, you are immediately presented with a screen with the details of the house on the right side, and the location marker of the house becomes bigger to highlight the location of the place. You can see the “to-the-point” details in brief in the pane at the right, but if you wish to read more about the home, you can easily do so by clicking on the View More Details button at the bottom of the pane at the right.

Zillow - More Details

As you can see, clicking on View More Details button maximizes the pane at the right, and you are shown a brief written summary of the house, its location, and the photos posted by its owner. You can click on a particular photo to open it up in full screen size. You can also use the back arrow button at the top left corner to return to the main page of the app.

Though your default location will open up on the map when you launch the app, you can change the location by zooming out of the map and zooming into the location where you might be interested. Coming to the control bars, when you right click anywhere inside the app, two control bars – one from the bottom and the other from the top fly out, will appear.

Zillow - Options

Bottom Control Bar:

The control bar at the bottom of the screen allows you to change the Map Style (choose from road view, aerial view, or bird’s eye view), Filter your results (by inputting your budget, area requirements, etc.) or Sort your search results according to price, area, etc. Filter and Sort perform a similar function, but Filter tends to take more accuracy into account, i.e., you can input the exact price bracket for houses you are looking for (for eg., 60000 to 120000 $) whereas in Sort, you can merely sort by highest or lowest price at the top.

Top Control Bar:

The control bar at the top has following controls-

Home: Clicking here will instantly take you to the map screen of the app from wherever you are inside the app.

Saved Searches: To use this feature, you need to have a Zillow account and sign in to it.

Zillow - Sign In

Clicking on the Saved Searches button will bring up the sign in box, and once signed in, you can access the searches that you have saved on the Zillow website.

Favorite homes: When you are reading the details of a home and you like it, you can launch the control bar and click on Add Home button in the bottom control bar. These homes appear in the Favorite Homes tab.

This pretty much concludes all that you need to know about this app to start using it and begin looking for property online!

Similar app: RESAAS.

The Verdict…

Zillow is a very neat app that makes searching for properties a lot cheaper and easier. You will definitely love it! You can also check out our review of websites that allow you to find foreclosure properties online.

Get Zillow.