Aloha friends, we’ve just pushed out a minor upgrade to the Nestoria property search API, bumping things up to v1.08. At the request of a friendly developer, we’ve introduced a new method that allows you to query for a list of all valid keywords that you can use to filter listings. Big thanks for the suggestion.
Also, the Nestoria API perl module was recently upgraded as well. The details are on the located, as ever, on the API technical details page. We look forward to meeting some API users at the Google Developer Day on Thursday.Archive for May, 2007
Dearest Nestors,
as you know, we spend our fair share of time here at Nestoria pondering maps, and how better to use maps to convey property information. We’re constantly scouring the web for innovation or just general coolness. We thought we’d post a few of the many sites that have caught our eye over the last few weeks:- Postcode map of the UK The UK in the form of a periodic table.Strangemaps lives up to it’s name and is easily one of the most consistently interesting blogs on the internet. Great posts made even better by insightful reader comments. Subscribe immediately.
- It was in the comments of the above post that we found the motorway map of England, Scotland and Wales - our road network in the form of a London Tube map.
- Speaking of the Tube here are two interesting ones: First, a comparison of the tube networks of major world cities all shown at the same scale (who knew San Francisiso was so big). Secondly, the useful Way out tube map that shows you which car of the tube to be in to be closest to the exit (every second counts!)
- Taking a different and innovative approach to the problem of overlaying data on a map is this flash-as-book map of surrey
- And finally, for those of you who want to spend your three day weekend contemplating the impending environmental apocalypse we present this recent offering from the Guardian Europe’s future climate map. Which shows cities not where they are, but where their climate in 2071 would correspond to in today’s geography. An interesting mental twist.
As you see, lots of different approaches to data representation. Rest assured we’re hard at work thinking of better ways to present the wealth of property data we have here at Nestoria, be it on a map or not. We hope to have a few interface changes in the coming weeks.
In the meanwhile, we wish you a bank holiday weekend of happy map browsing, whether on Nestoria while searching for property, or elsewhere.As part of our ongoing series of interviews with thought leaders from the online property sectors, today we look across the Atlantic to interview Mike Price, President of US based firm 360Podcast, parent company of MLPodcast. MLPodcast provides innovative tools to help agents utilize new audio and video technologies to market their properties.
Mike’s is a regular blogger, and his recent post about “Real Estate 2.0″ captured the dual sense of opportunity and anxiety many in the property industry feel about new technologies. Mike, thanks for taking the time to speak with us. 1. Talk a bit about some of the new technologies MLPodcast is developing, and how you see agents use this technology to generate deals. Our clients are taking advantage of syndication to increase exposure to their listings. Having a listing enhancement like a virtual tour or flash video is good, however, it makes the assumption that a consumer has already found the listing. Podcast feeds allow us to aggregate not only videos, but data and keywords into a broadcast. We’ve spent over a year building a network of search engines and directories that accept podcast feeds. By submitting to this network our clients are greatly improving the chances of listing being found, either in a direct referral from a portal or directory, or through organic searches in Google, Yahoo etc. We have access to a couple of client’s log file data for their domains and the results have been nothing short of amazing. We have several exciting new features being released in stages including a new ordering and client tool system. We’ve also recently added some additional voice talent for narration and new music tracks. The MLPodcast video directory will be undergoing some major changes in the near future as well. 2. Technological innovation is of course nothing new. Nevertheless it seems the pace of change over in online real estate has really accelerated in the last year. What do you attribute this to, and what are the major trends that you see gaining widespread adoption? There are several factors that have an impact on the issue. Consumers have become much more comfortable and adept at using the web. As a result they are placing more demand on the industry to get more creative with marketing. Smart brokers are using technology to morph into business models that combine the best of traditional practices with features and pricing that yield to customer demand. If that eventually means higher volume and lower margins, technology will be a key component to making it work. On the other hand, models are emerging at the luxury end of the scale that will place emphasis on lower volume and higher margins through new revenue streams. I think in between you’ll see several hybrids of different business models. The real estate professional of the future is going to need a decidedly different skill set. One of those skills will rely in how nimble they can be, luckily enough, technology, applied correctly, affords the ability to react to shifts in the industry and reshape business models without the need to start over with a completely new investment or infrastructure. 3. What are your thoughts on the developments specifically in the property search sector in the last 18 months? Forward thinking companies like Nestoria and Trulia are using web technology to improve the consumer experience when it comes to searching for property. An article in Inman news today had a great quote from a broker. “Tony Floyd, senior vice president for Prudential Georgia Realty, said, “I don’t view Internet marketing companies as competition, I view them as enablers. Some are better, some are worse than others,” he said.” I think that sums it up. The real estate industry has had enough time to figure out that the Lion isn’t coming over the hill. The only thing they have to fear is their own complacency in terms of coming to grips with how technology and the web effect the way they do business. 4. What are the challenges you think a vertical search engine for property like Nestoria faces? From a competitive standpoint I think my concern would be in continually adding value to the service, both in terms of consumers and the real estate industry. Of course there’s the challenge of capturing as many listings as possible. You have a great challenge/opportunity to add to the traction you enjoy now by moving into as many markets as possible. Then there’s the biggest challenge of all, revenue generation. If advertising alone isn’t enough to sustain a good ROI for your investors, creating new streams of revenue by providing additional products to the Real Estate industry could become necessary. I wish you the best of luck! Thanks Mike, you’ll be happy to know we’re continually working on adding value. Keep up the innovation! For anyone interested in tracking Mike’s progress we highly recommend subscribing to his Web 2.0 For Real Estate Pros blog. past Nestoria interviews: Prashant Agarwal, Paul Carr, Steve CoastWho would you like to see interviewed next? Let us know. For those that are interested, we’ve also launched our interview series on our Spanish blog with this week’s interview of Javier Martín.
As long-term readers of this blog will recall, last summer Nestoria sponsored the initial development of Mapstraction, a javascript library that makes switching mapping providers as easy as possible.
Yesterday the volunteers behind this opensource project announced a major upgrade, including support for six different mapping providers (MultiMap and Map24 are the newest), support for marker filters, many demos, support for GeoRSS, easy integration of geo-referenced images, a new look and feel to the homepage, and more.
Mapstraction has had more and more coverage recently. We’ve had mapstraction code live on Nestoria results pages (for example this search for a two bed flat to rent in Hampstead under 400 per week) for over six months now, and it works very well. It’s a great tool that everyone in the online mapping community should be aware of. Congratulations to all the volunteers who have contributed - this is a big step forward. So, does this mean we plan on switching away from Google maps? No, Google maps are great. We don’t mind saying how much we like Google’s APIs. To Google’s credit, they haven’t just rested on their lead in this space. Despite great innovation over the last year from other players like Yahoo! Maps and MultiMap, Google have done an excellent job of staying ahead of their competition. The result of all this innovation: more and more features for services like Nestoria and thus for everyone who tries to find a home via our site. We look forward to more new development in this space.Great news loyal Nestorions,
You’ll once again get the chance to see us live and in colour at the London Google Developer Day on Thursday, 31 May where Mike Astle, our head of engineering, will be speaking. Besides being a great chance to interact with the UK developer community, this is of course a big honour for us here at Nestoria. We’re the only start up that will be presenting. Looking over the agenda, it is certain be a great event. Big thanks to the kids over at Google for organising (and for all the hard work of creating great APIs for the world to build upon). All the talks promise to be interesting, but if you’ve made it onto the invite list I really do advise you to sign up for the Nestoria session. So, who is Mike Astle? Mike heads up our engineering efforts here at Lokku. He’s an ice cold internet veteran, having worked at Overture (now Yahoo! Search Marketing) and idealab! for many years. In his talk he’ll be revealing some of the tips and tricks we use here to wrangle masses of data to provide property searchers across the UK and Spain with a simple and easy way to find property (BTW, we give you the results of all our hard work for free via our property data API). Mike is also an “entertaining” speaker.
Wow, this week’s launch of Nestoria in Spain has generated a fair amount of buzz on the old interweb.
We’ve had coverage in English in the UK on- Vecosys - Hola Spain, no time for a siesta, Nestoria is expanding
- Renthusiast interviewed me.
- As did e-consultancy.
- Meanwhile Ben over at the Rat and Mouse covered the launch in his usual witty style.
and some coverage in the US over on Web 2.0 For Real Estate Pros.
As you might expect there was a fair amount of Spanish coverage, here are a few examples:And, not to be out done, there was also a bit of coverage in Basque.
It will be a while before we turn our attention to another new European market, but it was good to see we are also already becoming known in the German speaking property blog world and amongst French property bloggers. One final bit of good news, you no longer have to just read about the launch of nestoria.es, you can now get your own free and easy co-branded version for your website. Read the details on our Spanish blog or go straight to the implementation guide. Have a good weekendOver the last few weeks we’ve had requests from several estate agents for Nestoria logos to put on their site or publish in offline promotion. This is a great way to show potential sellers how well marketed their property will be.
We’re of course delighted, and as such we’ve put together a little gallery of Nestoria logos for anyone to use. The logos range from the tiny:
As promised, we’ve now upgraded the Nestoria property data API to include some special tweaks for Spanish property queries. You can now limit Spanish searches by maximum or minimum size (in square metres) and you can now query using Spanish keywords.
As always the change log at the bottom of out API technical details page is the place to look for a full explanation. Enjoy.Dearest Nestoria fans, today marks a big day for us, we’ve expanded Nestoria beyond the shores of the UK with the launch of nestoria.es !!!!
Over the last few years Spain has been one of the fastest growing EU property markets, especially with new property developments. Given that some of the Lokku team comes from Spain it seemed natural to try to adapt our skills to the Spanish market. As with the UK, we came to the conclusion that a vertical search engine like Nestoria is a useful tool for part of the property buying or renting experience. We look forward to working together with everyone in the Spanish online real estate sector to help make finding a property a simpler and less stressful process. Some key points about our new child:
- Over 250,000 listings of houses (adosados o chalets) and flats (pisos) to buy and rent. We’ve been able to partner with some of the biggest sites in Spanish online real estate to provide property searchers with one of the most comprehensive databases online. (and will hopefully have more coming online soon).
- We know many UK property searchers love the local information we provide about each area, and Spanish users are no different. We’ve added standard local content overlays like schools for all of Spain and public transport for the major cities. We’ve also been able to partner with some cool Spanish sites to give our new Nestoria a more human and fun feel. Check out photos from our friends at photo sharing site Panoramio and points of interest submitted by the users of Tagzania. Finally, we support the internet revolution by allowing you to see free wifi from the foneros. Of course this is just a start and we’ll be adding more (and more relevant) local content over time.
- Besides our standard web interface, we of course offer RSS feeds and our webmaster tools in Spanish. Help yourself to our customisable Property Lists and our DropIn maps for your website. Co-branded search isn’t available yet, but will be by the end of this week.
- Our full property data API is now extended to allow any developer anywhere access to UK and Spanish property data. We’ll push out a few Spain specific tweaks by the end of this week.
- Nestoria just wouldn’t be Nestoria without a blog (and attentive readers like you). For those of you that habla un poquito please subscribe to our Spanish musings.
- For now nestoria.es is in Spanish for Spanish speakers. We may in the future offer a search engine of Spanish property (second homes, vacation homes) for UK buyers. We may also offer versions in other languages like Catalan, Basque, Galician.
We’ve just upgraded the Nestoria property search API to version 1.06. You can now query the API to only return homes to buy or sale that have (or don’t have) a particular keyword.
For example if you only want to see properties with a garden or a balcony or you don’t want to see flats that are lower ground floor or ex local authority, you can now use the API to find exactly the houses and flats to buy or let that you are interested in. One note of interest - this is the first time we’re releasing new search functionality via the API before we released it via the standard web interface. We will of course be adding this functionality to our web interface (and RSS, drop-in maps and property lists in the coming weeks. But in the meanwhile we’re very keen to get feedback from lead users like those that use the API. Happy house hunting and please let us know what you think.
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