I first heard about this app late last year in the Sydney Morning Herald during one of my morning ritual internet surfs and the last I heard of the app was late last year at the AIMIA Awards. The app won multiple awards that night not to mention the Best of the Best Award.

See, the app works like this. You point your iPhone (using its inbuilt camera) to a residential property and using Augmented Reality (AR) the customer is then able to receive information about the property including whether its for sale, its current sale price, what its past sale price was, and how many bedrooms and bathrooms there are. Pretty funky right?

Customers also have access to tools and calculators and contacts to sales agents, financial planners and home lenders. All this public information is taken from realestate.com.au and rpdata.com.au.

AR technology has always been a funny thing for me – it’s been hyped up over the past few years. It’s dwindling down now but it was supposed to be “the next best thing” when its been mostly used for novelty. But what I really like about CBA’s app is that it uses the technology for a specific function. A function that customers can actually find really useful. The UI has been incredibly thought out and I really love the seamless visual branding between the CBA website and this app.

Now it’s been nearly a year since it’s launch and users have given it some pretty mixed reviews. It’s got about 37 ratings so far on the Apple Store and customers either really hate it or really love it – very few in betweens. Overall 2 and half stars! I think a lot of the pain is coming from the fragility of the app. It apparently crashes from time to time, and data doesn’t seem to be up-to-date when it does actually display correctly. The app definitely needs some tweaking in the next year and CBA will really need to work on its robustness. So for now, my answer is no, I don’t think it is “revolutionising the property market in Australia.” But I do believe that once CBA gets those tweaks sorted it will be the vision that it was meant to be.

All photos courtesy of Commonwealth Bank of Australia

Fun facts:
I just thought it would be cool to note down the awesome company agencies that worked with CBA to get this app conceptualised, built and launched in only 5 months!

• Project owners The White Agency
• Creative/Experience lead Vivant
• Technical lead RP Data
• Data suppliers Ikon Communications
• Media agency

★

Jessa