Nestoria Blog

Hola Nestorianos,

It’s now been four months since we launched Nestoria in Spain and we thought it might be a good time to update you, our loyal readers, on our progress. On the one hand, we have seen a nice growth in usage (despite the fact that August is traditionally a holiday month in Spain). On the other hand it is clear we still have a lot to learn.

As you know, we continually track many, many metrics to try to understand how we could make the experience of finding a house to buy or rent even easier. We divide these metrics into a few broad topics that we’ll go into here.

• Comprehensiveness: we’re very happy to report that we’ve grown a lot since our launch. Our database now contains over 550,000 properties to rent and buy from great partners like Atrea-BBVA, Globaliza, Idealista, Inzoco, Ivive, Kyero, Portae, SacaCasa, Suvivienda (El Mundo), Urbaniza, Yaencontre. Many thanks to all of our partners for their trust in working with a start up. We hope the list will continue to grow in the coming months
• Relevancy: We believe relevancy consists of two pieces. Correctly determining the location you are interested in, and then determining the best properties to show you for that area. We have had to learn a great deal about Spanish geography. A very, very simplistic example: the metro station Bilbao in Madrid is not the same thing as the city Bilbao. These are the core challenges a property search engine needs to dominate, and one we work on continually.

  Of course, once we have identified the correct area, we then need to fine tune Nestoria Rank our ranking algorithm.

• Usability: By usability we mean is the site fast, understandable, and easy to use. We’re continually working on improving these things. We were very pleased to see our homepage gets a score of 94 (out of 100) using yslow the new speed measuring tool from Yahoo!. Like in the UK, we’ve recently rolled out improved slider technology

  Specifically for Spain we’ve added more local content; property searchers are now able to see nearby train stations and hospitals.

  Just like in the UK we’ve also built new ways to access Nestoria, like our google mapplet and our Facebook application - which we believe was the world’s first non-English Facebook application.

  We know the work on usability is never finished. We can always make the site faster and easier to use. We also know we don’t have all the answers, which is why we offer our API to allow everyone to experiment with different ways of presenting Nestoria results. Our recent Hack contest was won by two Spanish developers.

Overall, we are encouraged by the positive feedback we’ve had over the last few months. Please keep your comments coming. We’ve completed only the first mile of a long journey and have a lot more work ahead of us. The mountain of data is growing rapidly, and properly analysing it will be a challenge.

As our database has grown, more and more we are facing the challenge of determining how to rank the many properties we have. We have been experimenting with many algorithms and have learned a lot. This will remain be a key focus in the coming months. For example, we’re aware that now we are faced with duplicated properties from several sources, as you can see here:

Clearly this is a terrible user experience and one we are working to fix. Other items on our upcoming to do list include adding the ability to filter by ‘keywords’, for example to specify that you want to see only houses with gardens, or parking. More on this soon.

Okay, time to get back to work. If this post has raised your interest (and you speak Spanish), I invite you to subscribe to our Spanish blog, otherwise we’ll keep you posted here every few months.