By now, we all know the future is mobile (related reading).

There are some killer real estate apps that exist. Those with the largest adoption are built by Zillow, Realtor.com, Redfin, and Trulia. Yet, I have to imagine, there are other real estate apps that should/could exist that would end up on your home screen. The problem is matching development talent, time, and investment with end users.

Assembly has an interesting model crowd sourced model for app development.

Every month the Assembly community picks an amazing idea for an app. They then use Assembly to build it together and share its profits.

Support Foo is the first app being built.

How exactly does the model work?

• Anyone can submit an idea.
• App ideas are voted on by the community. You can see the top ideas here.
• 1 idea per month is green lighted for development.
• 5% of the app revenue/equity goes to the person who submits the idea.
• Contributors to the app development are given an equity stake based on the contributions they make to the finished project.
• Profits are distributed among all contributors.

What’s Smart

The hardest part of any app is getting user adoption. Part of the value to this model is the people who express interest in an idea prior to development even beginning. Theoretically, this should mean that apps that no one will actually use end up never being built. And the ones that people will use have an existing beta group of users already committed.

Real Estate Apps

Are there enough people within the real estate community to support a real estate specific version of this crowd sourced development model? The key is developers and designers; there is really no shortage of app ideas. But are there techies in the industry who would be interested in building more apps in their free time, in exchange for future payouts? Is there a community of tech savvy agents and brokers (or franchises) who have pain points they want solved? Could this complement NAR Reach? Or Inman Incubator? Or Zillow’s internal hack weeks?

The first idea I’d throw out there? A travel concierge app 🙂

Next Steps

If you’re interested in this model existing for our industry, leave a comment. Or you can email me (drew at ohheyworld).