Dearest Nestoritians,
If, like the Nestoria team, you live in
London, you spend much of your time contemplating the insanity of property pricing. Just when it feels like things can’t get more expensive, they do. At times it seems to defy all logic. Are there really that many Russian billionaires and ex-Prime Ministers buying everything up?
We thought we’d take a look at some of the data of how users of Nestoria searching in London behave differently than users searching for homes in the rest of the UK.
The results of the London housing price boom are easily visible when we look at the price of properties that Nestoria users click on:
The curve is shifted much higher for London searchers with well over 5% of clicks in London for properties at prices over £1,000,000. Are these prices sustainable, especially given that financial bonuses in “
the City” are likely to be lower this year than last?
Hard to say. Whatever the outcome though we here at Nestoria will be combing our data for ways to make finding a property as easy as possible. Likewise, we’ll continue looking for more useful insights that can be gleaned from aggregated behavior data. Please
let us know what types of data you, our valued readers, are interested in.
Fellow Nestorvanians,
A bit of feedback has reached us that last week’s post about the
click distribution on Nestoria. It seems that the post, while insightful, was perhaps a mis-titled, in that we didn’t actually discuss
where, in the geographic sense, users are clicking. Apologies. We offer today’s post as a correction.
Here you see the geographic distribution of all property clicks of Nestoria UK users in July of 2007:
So what’s interesting about this? Well, a few things:
- Though we initially launched Nestoria last summer with coverage only of properties in Greater London, London and the South East now account for only 25% of our usage.
- It looks like we have room to improve in Wales. Perhaps we do need a Welsh language property search?
- In general, we’re pleased with the healthy distribution across all parts of the UK.
Of course, if you think we’re underserving your particular corner of the realm, do please get in touch and let us know how we could improve.
In closing, we see there is
interest in us providing this data in a more regular and more easily digestable format. Rest assured Nestoria fans, we hear you, and are working on it. Watch this space!
Fellow Nestorstanis,
As you know we take a very analytical approach to trying to understand user behaviour on the Nestoria site. We then feed that information into our product design process. Indeed, one of the technical achievements we’re most pleased with is our internal metrics/analysis system. We literally measure every click on the site.
For a long time now we’ve mulled ways to present some of this information back to the users - or anyone who’s interested really - in an aggregated form. We have several projects along these lines and we hope that in the coming weeks and months there will be more to see along those lines. The challenge of wrangling the data becomes more difficult as the volumes increase. While we can’t reveal exact numbers, Comscore reported record nestoria.co.uk traffic in June, and we are now generating multiple hundreds of thousands of click outs each month, so the data volume is becoming non-trivial.
Nevertheless, in the spirit that “good today is better than perfect tomorrow” we thought that we’d whet your appetites with some basic information.
Here for example is the break down of what type of property listings users clicked on in July 2007.
We see that we have a fairly even distribution between rentals and sales, with flatshares making up only a tiny portion of user interest.
Looking more deeply at homes for sale click behaviour, we break that down by price:
As one would expect most of the action is at the more affordable end of the market, but even at high price ranges there is still significant volume.
Perhaps we’re just data geeks, but we enjoy looking at pictures like this. We hope you do too.
Coming soon, a comparison of behaviour in the perverse property market that is London versus the rest of the UK.
For this month’s Nestoria Interview we have the pleasure of speaking with Harvey Edgecombe, the man behind property blog Renthusiast. Based in London, Harvey works for a private property investment vehicle and is responsible for business development and research.
Harvey, thanks for speaking with us.
1. Tell us a bit about your experiences blogging about property for the last few years. What sorts of interactions have you had as a result? Most importantly, has it helped business?
Blogging is very good for business, I see it as a vital communication tool and I’ve managed to build a portfolio of contacts including developers, agents, and numerous potential clients to name a few. Plus, through blogging, I’m able to keep my finger on the pulse of real estate technology, which changes rapidly. Also, the ability to express my thoughts and people respecting my opinion to some degree is very rewarding.
2. As a keen observer of the market, do you think the ‘impending housing crash’ will become reality?
I think it is already a reality for some people. For people who are prudent with their money, they should be able to weather the storm, but for those who are careless and speculative, they are bound to feel the effects as interest rates and the costs associated with borrowing money continue to rise. In the UK, I think the housing market will probably feel the effects of the sub-prime crisis that’s affecting North America, but I don’t think it will be as dramatic over here as it is currently in the US. Overall, the UK economy appears resilient, but the US dollar dropping in value, which is worrying, since it is currently the global benchmark currency.
3. What are your thoughts on the developments in the property search sector in the last 18 months?
Amazing. There have been so many new and innovative services that it’s hard to keep up. Search is crucial to the property business, but I don’t think it gets the respect it deserves in the wider industry. Newspapers, print magazines and other forms of media have always played a crucial role in the real estate business. It’s how people find their property. When I moved to London in the late 90’s, I rented my flat through the Loot newspaper, which was recommended to me by a friend. Subsequently I recommended it to others including my sister when she was planning her move to London.
Today, if I were moving to a new city or recommending a service, I most certainly would start on-line, as would most people, as the web is now an essential part of life. The innovation in property search in the last 18 months stems from the frustration that most of us found when using clunky online search tools of the past; most of which were not at all customer focused and user friendly. Fortunately things are beginning to change.
4. What are the challenges you think a vertical search engine for property like Nestoria faces?
I think the biggest challenge facing Nestoria and the vertical search world is remaining relevant to the consumer and not becoming ‘over-developed’ for lack of a better word. Again, it seems like every other day, there is some new company with some new product or API which seems to be the ‘must-have ‘ tool for the moment. Reality is that many of these tools that we rave about today will be long forgotten in the not too distant future. Is there a bubble in web 2.0? I hate using the term, because it gets thrown around so much. But I think right now, with all the innovation going on, the biggest challenge is to keep eyes focused on the consumer.
Who are your consumers, and what do they want? Do they want Facebook? Video search? The developer community gets excited when something new comes along that they like. The question to ask yourself is will your consumers like it. And if they like it, will they use it and recommend it to their friends?
Thanks Harvey. Wise words. As engineers there’s always a temptation to think ‘yet another feature’ will create user satisfaction. It’s exactly to prevent that sort of mentality that we take such a numbers based approach to Nestoria. We continually measure what happens on the site and take our cues from user behaviour.
Renthusiast is always a pleasure. For anyone interested in a unique perspective on the turbulent world of property, I highly recommend subscribing.
past Nestoria interviews:
Marc Wick,
Nick Black,
Fleming Madsen.
I wonder how many of our loyal readers wish that they were Glaswegian postal workers. Perhaps not many, until today.
Upon checking the contents of her handbag, one such worker, suddenly went from earning ??20,000 a year to most probably earning more than that per week in interest alone after discovering her win of ??35m on the Euro Millions lottery.
The winner is quoted as saying, “My son does not want to move out of the flat and I don’t want to move too far away because he is going into fourth year at school.”.
May we suggest that Nestoria be your first stop. Ditch the den and move into a luxurious 1.5m property in Thorntonhall.
We’re sure your son won’t mind too much.
Alternatively, if you fancy blowing ??20m out of the ??35m, then why not take a look at property in Kensington?
Come to think of it, why not do both?
A few months ago we were delighted when Google used Nestoria as the Google Maps API case study. It was a real honour for our little team, especially in the context of how many interesting uses of Google Maps there are (for those that don’t already know of Google Maps Mania, I recommend subscribing. It’s a great blog that regularly features new projects around the world using Google Maps).
Since then we’ve been getting a lot of questions about Google Maps and how we use them on Nestoria. It’s hard to believe that only two and a half years ago Google maps, and the intense innovation it spawned in online cartography, didn’t exist. Amazing how far we’ve come. Still, one of the most common questions we get is “what new features would you like to see from Google maps”? In the hopes that someone out there at Google or in the online geography world is reading this, we’ve posted them.
- Make the maps load faster. We work hard to make Nestoria as fast as possible. Unfortunately, the rendering of our results pages always waits on the rendering of the map. That’s a downer. We know what we’re asking is hard. If it were easy everyone would do it.
This is far and away our most desired ‘feature’. We don’t care what sorts of caching black magic deals with the devil you have to make, do it.
- Make maps work in Facebook. Okay, technically this is as much a Facebook request as a Google request, but you’re all there in Silicon Valley. Work it out. Find a way. Let’s all get along and be friends. We want to add maps to the Nestoria Facebook apps.
- Integrate Google analytics into Google Maps. We’re data junkies and are big fans of Google Analytics as a way to validate our own bespoke metrics systems. It would be cool to have that type of reporting for maps as well. How are people using the map on our sites? Let us see, please.
Don’t get us wrong, we love all the zooming features, the overlays, the polygons that are continually being added. All great stuff. We love that parts of the map code are now opensourced. But these three features are the ones we want most.
One final note, we want to recognize that Google aren’t the only people innovating. Great stuff recently from the teams at
Yahoo!,
MSN,
multimap, and
OpenStreetMap, and we watch them all closely. Very cool that they’ve all risen to the challenge laid down by Google. Internet users everywhere are the better off for it.
What’s your mapping wish list?
Fellow Nestorianos,
For those of you with more than a recreational interest in geographic matters, I invite you to attend
AGI2007 on the 19th-20th of September in
Stratford-upon-Avon.
The annual gathering of the
Association of Geographic Information, AGI2007 should be a great chance to hear from many players in a very rapidly evolving industry. My own talk will focus on some of the challenges we’ve faced as a start up building a service that is heavily dependent on geographic data. The entire line up looks very promising with discussions ranging from detailed case studies of interesting use of geographic information to more theoretical musings about the implications of the rapidly changing technology landscape.
Two former Nestoria interviewees
Nick Black and
Ed Parsons will also be speaking at the two day event.
For anyone interested in more details I refer you to the
conference blog. I hope to see you there.
Published by Ed on August 8, 2007
in search.
Fellow Nestorese,
as is our habit we often like to give you a peek behind the curtain of a vertical search engine and show you some of the challenges we face. Today I thought I’d explain the difficulty of ambiguity.
We humans have fallen into the lazy habit of using the same word to mean many things, including place names. A shockingly high number of places in the UK share the same name. For locals this is typically no problem, because it’s clear which place is being referred to, but it can make the lives of a property search engine developer struggling night and day to help you find homes to buy and rent as easily as possible very difficult. For example, if you just search for a
properties for sale in Rushton how do we know which of the three Rushtons in the UK you mean?
But of course there are some placenames, that, though they exist in multiple locations around the country, have a clear winner. For example,
properties for sale in Waterloo. In a flurry of post Napoleonic war celebration, many areas were named after the historic battle ground. There are five Waterloos around the UK, but when most people say they want to
rent a flat near Waterloo, they mean near the south London train station. In those cases we take you, our dear flat searching friend, directly to what we believe is the dominant result, but also give you the option to change your search to the more obscure locations:
Differentiating between the locations which are truly ‘ambiguous’ and those like Waterloo where there is a clear winner is the challenge. These are the subtle tweaks that lead to a product that ‘just works’. Please
let us know if you’ve found any locations you think we’re not quite getting right.
One final note, this problem is in no way isolated to the English language. In fact the UK isn’t bad - I’ll leave it to our
spanish blog to rant about how many
San Sebastians there are in Spain.
#!/usr/bin/nestoredes,
use WebService::Nestoria::Search;
{
Just about everything that makes Nestoria go is built using the Perl programming language and related tools. Perl is a flexible and widely-used alternative to more “enterprise” platforms like Java and .NET and has a larger and better-organized collection of free libraries available than Ruby or Python. We find that it scratches our technical itches very nicely.
To stay current, most of the Nestoria Tech Team will be attending
YAPC::Europe 2007 in Vienna at the end of August - the biggest yearly Perl event in Europe. We look forward to seeing a lot of friends from the London Perl Mongers and meeting other Perl users from across the continent. Larry Wall himself will be in attendance and will undoubtedly give a talk about what we can expect from Perl 6 - the as-yet-unready-for-prime-time next version of the language. If anybody wants to talk about the challenges building and scaling a vertical search engine built on Perl, Apache, MySQL, and Linux, do look us up.
}
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