Domain to release Tinder-style property app

The digital team at Fairfax-owned online property portal Domain have developed a new mobile app that allows users to save or reject properties using a simple swiping motion across the touchscreen when browsing.

PropertyMatch dev team in action.

Property Match, due for release in the next few weeks for both Apple and Android devices, will be offered in time for the site’s busiest season of the year – the Spring property market.

“We’ve seen a lot of change with mobile and how people use the current mobile platform and so we decided to take a leaf from more engaging platforms, like Tinder," said Damon Pezaro, product director for Domain. "It’s a format that suits itself really well to real estate.” 

The application purports to ‘learn’ a user’s preferences and serves back the types of properties preferenced, rather than being based purely on search criteria.

Pezaro believes the app will be of greatest value to first home buyers.

Currently in the testing phase, the app came about as a result of an idea presented at one of the Domain Group’s Innovation Days - a quarterly hack day that provides anyone within the Domain business the opportunity present an idea that could push the business forward.

The best idea is then selected for Code Camp - an offsite designed to engender the environment of a start up.

“We took a team of 12 developers, hired a beach house in Avalon and provided them with sugar, food, everything they needed," explained Pezaro. "Domain’s a big business and we are being disrupted by smaller players so we took the opportunity to act like one."

The technology team used agile methodology “to the extreme” to develop the application, he said. The house fridge was plastered with post-it notes detailing the project’s requirements, and all 12 members of the development team sat at one large table with decisions made in real time.

“We achieved so much in an incredibly short time frame,” said Pezaro. “We want to take what we learned from the experience and apply it to our in-house development approach.”