Craig Rowe reviews a mobile app for homebuying called Hōm that helps connect all parties to the deal with smart features, transparency and flexibility.
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This article was last updated May 15, 2025.
Hōm is a business productivity app for real estate agents to engage and maintain clients.
Platforms: Mobile-first; browser
Ideal for: Agents, homebuyers, mortgage professionals
Initial review: Jan 24
Update: May 2025 (New rating)
Top selling points:
- Branded agent experience
- Two-way consumer search app
- Loan and title integrations
- Deal tracking tools
- Onboard workflow guides
Top concerns:
The company may face some challenges selling its software as a standalone product in the midst of larger CRM and business applications offering similar mobile solutions already tied to larger enterprise systems. It’ll have to acutely define its audience.
What you should know
Hōm is a mobile-first real estate application motivated by the desire to provide agents with business data quickly in a mature, consumer-level experience. It looks great, feels light, and delivers home search, market performance insights, and marketing resources to both the agents and their consumer counterparts.
The UX is bifurcated, offering unique features to the agent and their client, with in-app communications and two-way activity tracking, meaning the agent can see what their client is searching for and saving.
Listing data is sourced from the user’s MLS accounts, from which market activity is also provided. There’s a filter for viewing homes by their “TCO” or true cost of ownership, a nice touch for buyers new to the process. Hōm offers messaging, extensive transaction guides to keep agents on track and clients educated, and a New Homeowner Checklist.
After more than a year in the market, Hōm has made a few updates that I was hoping to see upon my initial demo. Here’s what I said then:
There’s a lot of industry knowledge behind this app, so I trust it’ll evolve and find the inroads it needs to penetrate the market. Maybe next year, I’ll be unwrapping something all new.
So here we are. The app is not “all new” (it didn’t need to be — I made a mistake saying that) but it’s certainly made a few updates to more fully define itself in the marketplace, and give the agents who brand themselves to it more to work with, starting with its deal progress tracking tool. I always like features that keep consumers and agents aware of deal status, which is one of the more challenging aspects of the buying and selling experience.
The team compared its automated tracking feature to the “Domino’s Pizza Tracker,” an analogy I’m indescribably tired of hearing, but it nonetheless works. Hopefully, another well-known national food chain invents a suitable product delivery interface sooner rather than later. No offense.
It clearly displays the number of days until closing while graphing the percentage of completion of each major deal component: Real Estate Process, Mortgage Loan Process, Title & Escrow Process. Under each title is the more specific step underway, and tapping each header opens a more detailed breakdown of what’s happening. Nice.
Hōm has also directly integrated lending and title workflows into the communication process to better inform all parties and thus, significantly up the value of the application. The agent isn’t responsible for sending along such information anymore, allowing it to be more organic, timely and accurate.
The maturity of Hōm’s overall user experience remains intact, continues to help it stand out, and supports what I suspect is an easy onboard and adoption.
The company positions its solution as a “lifetime engagement platform,” which I think oversells the concept or, better stated, misses the mark. It doesn’t have to connect the agent to their clients forever; that’s the agent’s job. What Hōm can do is help agents react quickly to their clients and stay on top of their search activity without it being overwhelming. Delegate their search to the app.
I initially envisioned Hōm as better for primarily new buyers, but that’s changed, too. It’s aiming for the majority of the buyer market, and its arrow is speeding toward the bullseye.
The agent-facing “Buy Guide,” for example, is a narrative breakdown of the sales process for the user, starting with buyer onboarding and culminating with post-sales tasks. In between are subjects like “offer and purchase” and “closing and settlement.” This is a nice list to have handy, but after a few years in the industry, the process shouldn’t require Cliffs Notes.
However, the Buy Guide is replicated on the consumer side, and it’s supported by the New Homeowner Checklist, which details relocation punch-list items such as updating IDs, setting up security systems and locating shut-off valves. The My Home feature is engaging, offering a graphical summary of value and other home health metrics.
Hōm delivers a superb home search for the mobile screen, and the ability to view a home according to its general market data and its “true cost of ownership” is a nice reality check for the buyer who aspires to be in a neighborhood that their preapproval letter wasn’t intending to include. Again, this is a nice touch for the first-time buyer or maybe for a person relocating to a new market.
Clients are provided a general overview of how much home they can afford, and the multi-party buyer collaboration is great, a feature I’m going to demand to be present in every home search tool I look at for the rest of time. Rare is the buyer who makes decisions in a vacuum.
Agents are given a QR code to facilitate app downloading and setup, and from there, the client can also share their agent’s profile with friends.
Contacts within Hōm are pulled from the phone’s native database, meaning there isn’t a definitive CRM integration as of yet. This is something they’ll want to consider, as the app tracks home preferences, budgets, and, in general, critical data for an agent to know about a customer. New agents, however, without thousands of contacts to track, can be less concerned about this issue.
There’s a lot to like about Hōm. Its messaging tools are effective, its search functionality stands out, and its educational tools also keep clients engaged. Just about everything an agent needs to start and end their day in a productive manner is here.
The app has my attention, more of it than it did upon its launch. It appears its leadership team is listening to the market and responding to what it hears with sharp, relevant updates that don’t require a pivot or burdening the app’s value proposition. I’ve updated my rating.
Have a technology product you would like to discuss? Email Craig Rowe
Craig C. Rowe started in commercial real estate at the dawn of the dot-com boom, helping an array of commercial real estate companies fortify their online presence and analyze internal software decisions. He now helps agents with technology decisions and marketing through reviewing software and tech for Inman.
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