Lamudi launched in Uganda last year, listing several real estate properties and enrolling many other real estate brokers on its online platform. Now the company is making it even more convenient for users to hunt for their dream houses using only their mobile phones. The Android App follows its iOS App giving even more mobile users the opportunity to search for property, given Android’s 52% smartphone marketshare. So we gave the Lamudi App a spin on the Google Nexus 5 and Tecno H7 and here’s our first impression with Lamudi Android App. When you launch the App, the first thing you’ll be asked to do is select your country. While the splash screen hosts the cool Lamudi logo overlayed over a navy blue background, the App takes long to show the home page. The App then enables you to buy or rent a house from a wide range of location around Uganda through its search feature. Lamudi even goes as far as narrowing down to most suburbs in a given City or Town such as Lubowa, Bugolobi which we found really cool. However,the numerous forms that refine your search are quite overwhelming. We think that Lamudi should follow Google’s approach to search by making the search fields as simple as possible. Lamudi goes on to list prices in dollars rather than Shillings. This is of course frustrating since the user has to download another app, a currency converter, yet Lamudi can actually do this within its app. The App allows you to sort listing according to the most recent entry, the lowest and highest price. By the time of this mini-review, the app showed over 1,640 properties listed some of which include apartments, houses, land and commercial buildings. That’s quite some content and a thumbs up for Lamudi! Each listing shows the property details such photo of the property, price, rooms, bathrooms, size, land size, location and the broker. Should you pick interest, you can directly call or email the owner from within the App. Now that’s the convenience of mobile, uh. However, we think Lamudi should have been a bit more visual with its information about the various properties. We expected some photos inside the property for instance the kitchen, bathroom, living room, bedroom and compound instead of just showing the overall house or compound. What’s also impressive about the App is a map showing various properties listed. Perhaps this is a lot faster than filling in several forms to land on the property you want. The app doesn’t seem to know the users current location and hence won’t recommend available properties first closest to you before you can take you further. Lastly the App enables you to create an account so you can access your saved properties and searches. Problem is Lamudi doesn’t seem to understand that we hate to register for services especially when there’s the convenience of Facebook, Twitter and Google with which we can register/login with. Overall the App User Interface is clean, has enough listings over a wide area and less buggy. We mainly had a problem with listings priced in dollars and the too many form fields for search.
