HomeFinder lets you find homes in Europe, India, Brazil

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Here's a great new application that integrates property (for sale or rent) databases online into a slick interface for Symbian. HomeFinder is available in paid (£1) and free (ad-supported) versions and is intended for use in finding properties in UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, India and Brazil. Moreover, impressively, HomeFinder itself works in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. Below, I've done a walkthrough of its main screens and features.

HomeFinder screenshotHomeFinder screenshot
Nestoria is an aggregator of property that draws data from the various estate agent networks, HomeFinder acts as a front end for the service; Defaulting to your current location, you can set up a search according to 'buy' or 'rent', number of bedrooms, price (just drag the ends of the sliders to indicate a range) and so on. Impressively, when you pick another country, the currency units switch automatically and adjust themselves to sensible values.

HomeFinder screenshotHomeFinder screenshot
Looking for properties to buy around my location, the map can be zoomed or panned as needed; tapping on a property icon shows a snapshot photo, to give you an idea....

HomeFinder screenshotHomeFinder screenshot
... then tapping again brings up the photo (albeit in low resolution form), along with a price and the source hyperlink; following the link takes you onto the wider, wilder Internet in the Symbian Web browser and it's here that the experience gets somewhat broken, to be honest.

HomeFinder screenshotHomeFinder screenshot
Persevere with each destination web site and it's possible to get all the details you need, of course, including making a call to the appropriate estate agent straight from the phone; something else you can do with a found property is to email a link to the finer details to an address of your choice (e.g. your own address or your partner's), or to post to Twitter or Facebook, though I'm not sure why you'd want to...

HomeFinder screenshotHomeFinder screenshot
In addition to the map view, you can switch to a traditional scrolling list of thumbnails and basic details; you can also search in other areas or countries (see the list above), perhaps researching where you might move to. Note that coverage is not necessarily as thorough in other regions - my searches in Delhi (India) came up with several without images and some with what is is presumably a default image (of a UK house!)...

HomeFinder screenshotHomeFinder screenshot
Ah yes, my holiday flat in Delhi, all ready to rent, fully furnished.... ; tapping through to agent web sites, in general, produces as varied an experience as you might expect given the hundreds of estate agent web sites for any given country, but the majority come up trumps - Zoopla's, shown here, is particularly clear and mobile-friendly.

As a front end for a property search, HomeFinder takes some beating and is competitive with similar solutions on iOS and Android. Despite the transition to Web derailing the user experience each time you drill down, I can still heartily reocmmend this application as an easy way to get started in a property search. Or, perhaps, to nose around at purchase or rental prices in the area and country of your choice!

You can buy (£1) or download (ad-supported) HomeFinder now, just follow the links. Note also that there's a supporting web site, along with social links where needed.

Source / Credit: Nokia Store