International Journal of Information System and Engineering

Vol. 5 (No.1), April, 2017

ISSN: 2289-7615
DOI: 10.24924/ijise/2017.04/v5.iss1/01.12 www.ftms.edu.my/journals/index.php/journals/ijise
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Research Paper

EUREKA: ANALYSIS, DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A SMARTPHONE

APPLICATION FOR REAL ESTATE SEEKERS

Royce Foo Wai Kit

University of East London
FTMS College Malaysia
[email protected]

Kinn Abass Bakon

Lecturer cum Education Consultant
School of Engineering & Computing Sciences
FTMS College Malaysia
[email protected]

Abstract

Most of us search for properties to either buy or rent at some points in our lives. Currently, information
regarding properties for sell or rent could be achieved through newspapers, social media, websites,
magazines, posters, mobile applications, word of a mouth and many other means. Due to the prevalent
of Smartphones and the popularity of mobile applications, there are mobile apps like POSTERS,
PropertyGuru and IProperty which offer property or real estate information to their users. However,
popular features such as customer rating, property reviews and GPS navigation to the location of the
property required by property seekers are lacking in the above mentioned applications.

The aim of this study is to analyse, design and develop a real property mobile application that
could enable users to search for properties to buy or rent, use GPS to navigate to the location
of these properties, rate and review them after seeing them. The authors successfully
developed Eureka to possess the popular features lacking in similar applications.

Key Terms: Android, Global Positioning System, Real Estate Application, Tracking, Review,
Location Based Services, Mobile application, Smaprtphones

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1.0. Introduction

Real estates in Malaysia are categorized into terraced houses, town houses, semi-detached,
bungalows, apartments, condominiums and gated community type of properties.
(PropertyinMalaysia, 2014). Estates are sold by property agents meeting up with the buyers,
showing them the place, buyers and sellers negotiate until agreement are made. The process starts
when the buyer searches for information regarding their preferred property through social media,
websites, newspapers, mobile applications, magazines and many more. Users can also choose to
visit their website instead of using application or social media.

Getting the right information regarding ones property of choice is difficult as they are large amount
of data regarding various properties. And users turn to experience information overload. Besides,
some information may be outdated not updated. For renters who want a temporary place to stay,
they could find it difficult to get the right information. Foreign renters in particular may have
problem with the advertisements and places to look for. At times, it is difficult to know if real estate
agent is legally registered or not as some might be scam. Rental fees aren’t cheap not to mention the
travelling expenses just to visit the particular area via cab, bus or other means of transportation.

Today the cost of advertisement is skyrocketing and advertisements in particular, might even be
outdated. Real estate mobile applications available at the moment might help to search for the
address but sometimes it can be very misleading and it takes time for users to locate it due to
landscape changes and out-to-date map. Potential buyers who are not familiar with the area might
get lost

The aim of this study is to analyse, design and develop a real property mobile application that could
enable users to search for properties to buy or rent, use GPS to navigate to the location of the
property and rate and review the property.

2.0. Literature Review

An Overview of Location-Based Services

LBS is an information service that has a number of uses in social networking today that is
accessible with mobile devices using mobile network that displays geographical position and map.
Common applications that utilizes LBS are Navigation, Social Network Services and Sharing Photos
by making use of user’s temporary location (Miluzzo et al., 2008). With LBS, location-related data
and services becomes a powerful aspect in businesses. In LBS applications, users can choose to only
have certain information on display so that overwhelming information transfer can be avoided
(Patve et al., 2014). Furthermore with LBS today people can afford to have all the GPS functionality
in one place which is the Smartphones instead of buying another device to navigate around.
Smartphones has capability to locate itself because of LBS and that enables users to locate their lost
phones and lost items that have GPS capability. However further improvements should be made if
LBS and GPS were to be used indoors.

Improvement of accuracy under tunnels or inside building by improving the Localization

Improvement Algorithm & Kalman Filter Algorithms (Damani et al., 2015). Zilpe and Chatur (2012)
proposed a system called Inavigate which moves or guides someone towards his/her destination
without GPS network connection. Yin et al., (2014) proposed a system called LCARS, a spatial item
recommender system which helps user to get a recommendation of venues based on the local
interest and preferences from user’s activity history. Kjærgaard, (2012) developed a system called
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 the EnTracked system where a mixture of sensing motions from accelerometer readings and GPS
can also save power where if there are no motion detected the GPS will be switched off and as soon
as there is a motion the GPS will turn back on.

Table1. Comparison between Similar Systems and the Proposed System

Features PROPER PropertyGuru iProperty Eureka
User-Friendly ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
Categorical Search ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
Contacting Agents ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
Detailed Property Descriptions ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
Searching for nearby property ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
Map of Property's Surrounding ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
Searching for nearby agents x ✓ ✓ ✓
News Feed x ✓ ✓ ✓
Option to Call, Email, SMS Agents x ✓ ✓ ✓
Mortgage calculator x ✓ ✓ ✓
Have Agents Directory x x ✓ ✓
Have Developer Directory x x ✓ ✓
Property Review Note x x x ✓
Real Time GPS Navigation x x x ✓

The strength of PropertyGuru application is that it is reliable and user friendly to users. Besides,
some of its most popular features are its filtering of multiple categories ranging from nearest
location to price. It possesses notifications and alerts for nearby property or newly developed
property, newsfeed and bookmark functions. However, its major disadvantages are that, it does not
have real time navigation feature and does not have the rating and review features.

Another popular mobile app preferred by property customers is PROPER. PROPER too is very easy
to use. Yet, some of its shortcomings are that the search function only works after contacting the
agent, lack of GPS navigation and without rating and review features too..

IProperty too is a known mobile app that provides huge amount of real estate information to
users. IProperty is designed to have bigger fonts to enable users to use them easily. Besides, it
possess detailed search interface that can search for real property using multiple categories of
search and search within a radius of 3KM proximity to search for nearby properties and locate an
agent that is closest to one’s location. It also possesses a newsfeed function that enables users to
have access to news relating to the property market. Despite all these strengths of IProperty , it has
no Mortgage calculator, no GPS navigation function and there is no rating and reviewing feature for
potential customers.

Eureka, the proposed system would add the key features; real time GPS navigation and rating and
review functions which the existing systems are lacking.

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3.0. Research Methodology

This study uses quantitative method to gather data. The questionnaire or survey approach allows
data to be collected from large number of participants in a fast, easy, economical and efficient
(Sekaran and Bougie, 2011). The objectives of the survey conducted for this research is to
investigate the types of problems faced by the current users, determine the required features and
functionalities and to understand the user’s preferences in property management platforms.

Questionnaire Design

Convenience sampling technique was used for this survey. The questionnaire designs are based on
the Likert scale system. The scale ranges from 1 to 5 or strongly disagree to strongly agree. The
Likert System ranges from a group of categories and least to most. Respondent are asked to specify
how much they approve or disapprove, agree or disagree or believe to be true or false. There is no
specific way build a Likert scale. This will indicate how much people agree and disagree upon (Allen
and Seaman, 2007). The Likert scale system is implemented on questions 8 to 14 with 5 categories
consisting of Highly Disagree, Disagree, Neutral, Agree and Highly Agree.

The survey questions were categorized as follows.

I. Questions 1 – 3 are Demographic Data.
II. Questions 4 – 7 are questions related to the current issue.
III. Questions 8 – 14 are questions related to the system.

Survey Administration
The questionnaire was designed using Google Forms which is an online tool that can be easily
distributed through multiple links. As soon as the design was completed, the questionnaire was
distributed through Facebook & Twitter between to friends and family and other target audience
who fills the profile of a potential property buyer and also distributed to PropertyGuru staff. The
questionnaire was sent to a number of 115 people and a total of 57 were complete and returned.
The returned percentage was 50%. The low percentage of return could be caused by usage of
Online method of distribution of the survey.

4.0. Results and Discussions

Below are the analysis of some selected questions. These questions are selected based on their
relevance and relationship to the main functionalities that Euraka, the proposed system aims to
provide.

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 Q1. Type of Operating System

Fig 1: Type of Operating System Platform

The piechart above, has 73.7% or 42 respondents to be users of Android based smart
phones. This confirms a report by Vincent (2017) that 81.7% of smartphones sold in 2016
are Android based Smartphone. 24.6% or 14 respondents are using IOS based smart
phones. Only a single or 1.8% respondent uses Windows based smart. This justify the need
to It is shown that developing an android based system first is better than other mobile
operating system as Android based smart phone are more common in the market.

Q2. Need for Reviews & Feedback feature.

Fig 2: Requirement for Reviews & Feedback feature.

The graph above shows 72% of the respondents to prefer having reviews and feedback
function included in the proposed system. This indicate the popularity of this feature and
the need to include it in the proposed system.This finding helps the researchers to specify
the requirements explicitly. As by posited by Paetsch, (2003) requirement engineering will
enable developers to be well familiar of what to develop before the development of the system
starts so as to prevent expensive rework.

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 Q3. Real-Time Navigation Question.

Fig 3: Requirement for Real-Time Navigation.

Based on the results above, about 81% of the respondents agreed that real time
navigation is preferable while less than 2% disagree on it. This justifies the need to
include a real-time navigation function in in the system. This is another finding that
justifies the inclusion of this popular feature.

Q3. Users Acceptance of the Proposed Application Question.

Fig 4. Acceptance of Real Estate Mobile App.

As can be seen in the table above, 80% of the respondents would like to have mobile based
property searching applications. In other words, they are willing to adopt it if it was to be
implemented. This finding is important towards the success of the system if fully implemented as
Evans and Yen (2005) if an information system is to succeed, it is critical for users to accept
it.

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Proposed System Design
In order to further improve the functionality of the current real property application and to solve
the current issue, research proposed a GPS based and review functionality to be added to the
proposed application and name it Eureka. The system will assist the users with locating their
desired property with just a push of a button and not only that, Eureka will also help user to make
more firm decisions about the property they are about to purchase or rent by looking at the review
section of the property. The review section will contain the opinions and thoughts of the previous
tenants. The functionality is shown and summarized in Diagram 1.

Fig 5: Use Case Diagram of Eureka

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 Fig 6: Class Diagram of Eureka (The proposed system)

4.0. Proposed System Implementation

The proposed application will consist of Registered and Guest users. The registered users will be
able to bookmark their favorite property in other to view them later the application. In addition to
that is also the recent view functionality that allows the registered user to view the past property
that they viewed. The stated functionality are only available for registered users and aren’t
available to guest users as the database only matches the registered users logins. The other
difference would be the review section is not available to guest users as well because to provide
reliability information, the source needs to be valid again.

Users can access the system from wherever and whenever they are just with the need of internet
access and GPS functionality from their mobile device. However with the current algorithm created

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for the GPS functionality battery life is still getting consume at a moderate rate therefore users need
to use it at their own pace so that it doesn’t affect their daily usage.

Fig 7: Main Menu Interface

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 Fig 8: Options Menu Interface

After successfully developing the application, figure 1 and 2 are screenshot of Eureka’s Home
and Menu interfaces. The Home button brings user back to the main screen just in case the back
button will be too much of a hassle as searching can get into a direction where it is hard to use
the back button. The “Explore Property” option brings user to the page where they can search
for a rented or for sale property and it is using the search filter which allows customer to
navigate, customize the search to meet their own needs. “Agent List” and “Developer List” are
almost the same except that “Developer List” is for viewing purpose only without any contact
number or message. “Mortgage Calculator” enables one to calculate mortgage rates. The “Help &
Support” features guides and tutorials for the user of the application while “Feedback” would
enable users to provide useful data and information on how to improve the application. and
help improve the application further.

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5.0. Conclusion

Analysis, design and implementation of Android based Mobile application for locating a potential
property were discussed in this article. The analysis phased indicated that majority of the
respondents are Android Smartphone users and would be willing to use the proposed system if
fully implemented. Use Case and class diagrams were used to model the entire system. Java
programming was the language used to code the application and Waze developer mode was used as
the intent to redirect the search to Waze application. The aim of this study was successful achieved.
However, in the future this system could by having a better and reliable dedicated servers that
would contain properties database, GPS data, incorporating multimedia features like real time
voice.

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