Realtor.com’s Mobile App School Search Feature: Godsend for Parents

In much of America, particularly among military families such as my own, it’s coming up on “moving season.” In order to not disrupt most of the country’s public school schedules, families with school-aged children try to move in the summertime. In military communities, it’s tradition to see the “For Sale” and “For Rent” signs appearing throughout the local neighborhoods in the springtime, as families anticipate their June and July moves.

My own family will be moving in a mere five weeks–eek!–to Colorado Springs. Earlier this month we took a long weekend and flew out to choose a new house.

About 10 days prior to our trip, I found out about an update for the realtor.com mobile app service that I’ve relied on to send me customized search results for the areas in which we’re looking to live. This update would make realtor.com be the first mobile real estate search capability to fully integrate school information in their app.

I used this app quite a bit during our two days (and 11 houses) worth of searching. It was easy to see the public elementary, middle, and high schools that were zoned for each house. From those maps, one could click on the school location icon and easily see the Great Schools ratings, shade the map to show the school district boundary, and then re-focus their home search for only those homes in the school’s boundary area.

Some of the limitations of this capability were apparent right off the bat. First of all, the school icons don’t appear unless you’re zoomed in pretty closely. I can’t quantify the amount of zoom required, but it seems to be at the level where the side street names appear.

In addition, many of the schools’ Great Schools ratings weren’t appearing when I selected the yellow school icon. The Great Schools rating would read “NR” on the realtor.com app, but if I were to go straight to the GreatSchools.org website, a rating would be available.

Nonetheless, getting to see the school boundaries and bring able to focus home searches on specific schools were extremely useful for my family while we were searching for new houses last weekend.

The realtor.com mobile app is available free of charge on the Apple iOS (through the App Store) and Android (through Google Play) platforms.