Archive for September, 2006

What’s hot in London property search for September 2006

Published by Ed on September 29, 2006 in what's hot. 3 Comments

Nestoria generates a mountain of interesting data everyday, and we thought it might be good to share some of it with you, faithful reader.

One of the most common requests we get from our users is “Where are people searching for property?”. As you know, we only rolled out coverage of the full UK a few weeks ago (see some favourable press coverage), so it’s still a bit early to say where in the UK our users are most interested in, but now that we have three months of data for greater London we can say which areas of London our dear users (yes, we love you - each and every one of you) seem to be most focused on.

So here’s the list based on data from the full month of September:

Property to let (by place name)

  1. flats to rent in Hammersmith
  2. flats to rent in Whitechapel
  3. flats to rent in Earls Court
  4. flats to rent in Docklands

Property to let (by postcode)

  1. flats to rent in N1
  2. properties to rent in W11
  3. properties to rent in N5
  4. properties to rent in SE1

Property to buy (by place name)

  1. properties in Chiswick
  2. properties in Clapham
  3. properties in Hammersmith
  4. houses in Kennington

Property to buy (by postcode)

  1. properties in SW18
  2. properties in N5
  3. properties in SE1
  4. properties in N1

And with that, I wish you all a pleasant weekend.

Your prayers have been answered

Published by Ed on September 27, 2006 in New Features. 1 Comment

We spend a lot of time here at Nestoria doing two things:

1. thinking about how people want to search for property.
2. hoping there is some higher power that will help us track down those annoying little bugs that seem to creep into the software from time to time.

It was during one of these prayer sessions the other day that a flash of divine inspiration hit us: we should give Nestoria users a way to see places of worship near the properties they are looking at!

Whatever your religious beliefs - be it you want to live inside London’s eruv, or just be near a church or mosque, you can now use the map on Nestoria search result pages to see places of worship in a given area.


screenshot
So wherever your spiritual wanderings in life take you, Nestoria is there to help you find a home.

Peace be with you on your journey dear friend.

What is Nestoria Rank?

Published by Ed on September 25, 2006 in Nestoria Rank, New Features and about us. 5 Comments

Loyal readers, as promised, I’d like to explain a bit more about our default property search algorithm: Nestoria Rank.

We know that the providing a quality search experience depends on several elements: relevancy, freshness, comprehensiveness, data quality, and usability.

Relevancy is a very tricky thing - even consistently measuring it is tough. But it’s one of the things we spend most of our time working on.

When we first launched Nestoria in June our search was fairly basic. Since then we’ve tested several different algorithms that depend on many different parameters. Obvious elements of the equation are things like distance from the center point of a region and quality of the listing (does it have a photo, how comprehensive the data is, etc), but there are many others. We’ve also incorporated several ideas and comments from our users (many thanks).

We measure things quite closely, and the tests have been very revealing. Over the weeks we tweaked the parameters, and we now feel proud enough to actually give our algorithm a name. And thus Nestoria Rank was born.

Like any newborn, Nestoria Rank still has a lot of growth potential. We think right now we’re at about version 0.1 . Improving relevancy is an ongoing process, and we have a long list of ideas we’ll be testing to improve the property search experience. We’ll keep refining in the coming weeks and months, please keep the feedback coming!

A picture of the team discussing the next step in Nestoria Rank development:

The team at work discussing Nestoria Rank

Nestoria now covers the whole of the UK!

Published by Ed on September 21, 2006 in New Features. 8 Comments

The headline says it all!

We’ve now moved out of our London-only phase and into the whole of the UK.

We promised that this day would come, and now we are delivering, three months after our initial London launch!

Even if you’re not searching forproperties in Edinburgh, properties in Liverpool or sunny properties in Sheffield, why not have a browse around those areas just to check we’re not lying? You may even decide that it’s time to move.

We also took this as an opportunity to introduce a few new features:

1. Improvements to the relevancy of the results. Our team has a strong background in internet search and we’ve built a fairly robust system for tweaking the search algorithm. We’re so proud of it we’ve renamed our default search “Nestoria Rank”. Still a lot more to do of course, but we feel we’re on the right path. More on this in a future blog post.

2. We’ve given the whole system a general speed boost.

3. We’ve introduced the much requested “minimum price” filter.

4. We’ve fixed a whole bunch of little bugs, most noticeably in our search auto-completion.

5. We’ve sharpened the property images.

So, give it a try, and give us some feedback. We know it’s not perfect, so don’t hesitate to let us know where we could improve.

Now that we have a much larger possible user-base, we’re expecting more postcards.

Enjoy the site and tell all your friends, wherever they may be.

Python library for the Nestoria API

Published by Ed on September 21, 2006 in API. 4 Comments

Greetings Nestoria fans,

over the last few months we’ve had a few enquiries regarding our API. Behind the scenes wheels have been turning and many a developer has been scratching his head to come up with clever uses for the Nestoria database.

We’re delighted to present the beginnings of a library in the programming language python developed by Nando Quintana, a devoted Nestoria fan, that makes it even easier to access UK property data.

So python users, have fun - we look forward to seeing what you come up with!

For those of you out there that develop in other languages, fear not - we hope to be able to point you to other libraries in the near future. Please let us know if you’ve built something, we’ll gladly feature it here.

The carnival comes to town.

Published by Ed on September 13, 2006 in about us. 3 Comments

For those that haven’t seen it, a recent Nestoria interview with Michael Price of mlpodcast.com is ranked third in this week’s Carnival of Real Estate!

The Carnival is a collection of blog posts about the property industry, and is a great tool to stay abreast of industry trends.

Mike is doing some very interesting things with bringing the emergent trend of podcasting to the real estate industry. Though he has a US focus, anyone interested, like we are, in seeing how new technologies can effect the property industry should take a look at his site. Here’s the interview

As we mention in the interview itself, we love feedback, so please let us know what you think.

We’re del.icio.us

Published by Ahmed on September 12, 2006 in about us, tools and web 2.0. 1 Comment

We’re proud to announce a recent milestone here at Nestoria. A few days ago, we crossed a key threshhold at the social bookmarking site del.icio.us (wikipedia entry)

100+ people are sharing our link!

This confirms to us that many people are interested in our approach to searching for UK property. Best of all, the rate of bookmarking seems to be speeding up.

A big thanks to all our loyal users.If you’re still reading this but have no idea what del.icio.us is, have a look at an older blog post about the service.

South Chelsea? Where’s that?

Published by Ahmed on September 7, 2006 in New Features and search. 2 Comments

Time Out London recently posted an article which discussed the tendency of estate agents to invent nicer names for certain areas.

We realise that many of you may be trying to search by terms such as these and so, we are making a point of adding any such names we come across to our database.

Examples so far include:

If you come across any more of these ‘estate agent speak’ names, send them in and we’ll add them to Nestoria. We may even do a top 10 blog post.

Thank you and hello

Published by Ahmed on September 5, 2006 in about us. 0 Comments

At Nestoria, we're a friendly bunch and as such, we thought that we would take the time to say 'Hello' to many of our new subscribers (and thank you to those who have been with us from the beginning).

Hello!

Thank you!

Over the past couple of months, our blog readership has increased significantly. Perhaps this is due to coverage we have received on other sites, such as InternetPeeps, Mapperz, The Museum of Modern Betas, Emily Chang's Ehub, Read/Write web or Londonist. As you may have read, Nestoria is a UK property vertical search engine. We aim to make searching for property in the UK quick and easy. We strive to improve on a continual basis, and value all user feedback very highly so please do get in touch - whether you want to go for a coffee, or give some constructive criticism. However you came to Nestoria, we hope you enjoy the experience.