Greetings Nestorlinians,
we’ve just pushed live an upgrade to our API that now allows you to not only request information about specific properties, but also to request ‘meta’ information about an area like average prices. The data comes from the properties in the Nestoria databases (in the UK we have about 450,000 properties, in Spain we have over 700,000 properties) Here’s an example XML query for ‘average property prices in Chelsea‘. You can see the average cost over the last month of buying a one bed flat is £576,995. Yikes! For now we only show data from the last month, but over time the data available will grow making time trends possible. Many people have asked for this information over the last year, and we’re happy to finally be able to offer it. We look forward to seeing what you come up with. As usual we’d love to hear any feedback you have. As with all new features there will no doubt be some fine tuning necessary. One obvious question - when will you see property meta data like average house prices for an area on Nestoria search results page? Soon, very soon. A final note, as mentioned last week this upgrade does mean older versions of the API will no longer be supported. Please upgrade, it should be very painless. OK, enough blog reading, go forth and bask in the glory that is metadata. The detailed technical API specs are here. Well, actually if you do want some more blog reading, take a look at some early covrage over at TechCrunch and the Rat and Mouse.Archive for October, 2007
Dearest Nestoria API users,
Good news: we will very shortly be releasing version 1.12 of the API which will give you access to all sorts of new data. More detail soon. Bad news: we’re a very small team with limited resources. So that we can focus our effort on rolling out new features and improvements, we need to minimize the amount of code we have to maintain. As a result we’re going to turn off all version of the API prior to v1.11 soon. Please upgrade to newer versions. Upgrading should be very easy - the interface has not changed, only new features have been added. The easiest thing to do is to not specify a version explicitly in your request at all and you’ll automatically get the most recent version. Old news: our API technical help page remains the ’source of truth’ for all things API related. On a final note, big thanks to everyone who’s using the API. Please keep the feedback coming. We hope you’ll like the enhancement we’re about to roll out.Recently I had the chance to speak at the UK Geography industry’s annual conference - AGI 2007. The final event of the conference was a discussion about ‘neogeography’ versus traditional geography (christened ‘paeleogeography’ by former Nestora interviewee Ed Parsons at the event). There was much debate about what the term neogeography means and whether neogeography is at odds with or complementary to paleogeography. There was however no disputing that neogeography has caught the industry’s attention.
One example of neogeography in action is Gregory Marler’s recently begun Living with Dragons project. Gregory will spend the next few years living without commercial maps! We are delighted to announce Nestoria will be sponsoring Living with Dragons for the next few months to see how Gregory’s experiment turns out. Gregory created his first website at the age of 12. After completing college he went to work on online production at the New Statesman. While there Gregory worked on the new website launch and it’s many new blogs. After a couple of years, he decided it was time to experience university life before he got to old. This month Gregory moved to Durham to start a degree in Computer Science. He forgot to pack some maps, and has yet to see his first dragon. To kick off the partnership, we’ve invited Gregory to be this month’s Nestoria interviewee. 1. Explain the idea behind the ‘Living with Dragons’ project. Well the whole story of how it began is on the blog, but it can be cut down to something quite short. I made the decision to move to Durham, after only having spent 2 days there. In spring I looked on the OpenStreetMap, a non-commercial mapping project and Durham was very white/blank, it almost said “here be dragons”. So as I was into this amateur mapping stuff, and liking adventure, I decided I would go out and map it without knowing where I was going. I moved here in October and set up the website to keep me knowing my purpose while readers of the blog can make sure I don’t cheat. 2. What sorts of response have you got? Well it’s only been a week since I started but I’ve brought it up in a lot of conversations. A bit risky seeing as these are new friends I’m trying to make and everyone at home thinks I’m obsessed and a geek going to mapping conventions. Everyone here has been so interested that no conversation has gone the same way. I’ve discovered that archaeology students have a big interest in the map, the computer society would even like me to do a talk. On the business side it is looking like several organisations want to get onboard, such as the wonderful support from Nestoria. 3. What are your thoughts on the developments in the online geography sector (maps, etc) in the last 18 months? Well I haven’t been following the whole sector closely but I’ve had an eye on OpenStreetMap related activity for some time. OSM seemed to flourish in the last year with more people suddenly being aware of the community mapping project and it becoming easier and easier to join in. Unfortunately I couldn’t make it to the conference but listening to the podcasts we don’t just have to be mapping now. Take a break and play with the maps, make some art, program scripts that play with the data. How the user holds and controls the map has moved online sites to use slippy maps and even globes. Now we, the users, want to be overlaying stuff on maps: photos, lines and routes, hotels, even disaster areas in foreign countries. 4. What are the challenges you think a vertical search engine for property like Nestoria faces? I think the challenge that applies to many online services is to maintain a good user interface that is simple. For a vertical search engine you want to be adding more search options. With the aim of allowing the user to tell you exactly what they want to find, or even which options they’re not bothered but would prefer. This is great but too many options and suddenly the balance will flip and they’d rather search vague terms in a general web search or phoning several local estate agents. Thanks Gregory, we’ll work hard to keep it simple. Best of luck with the mapping. For those readers interested in following Gregory’s progress please subscribe to Living with Dragons. past Nestoria interviews: Artem Pavlenko, Harvey Edgecombe, Marc Wick.According to a recent article, Scottish house prices are rising even faster than those in England…
Surely this is the perfect time to grab a little hot cake before it burns up!
Properties in Inverurie and properties in Greenock were said to see the highest rises, whilst properties in Edinburgh still tops the tables as Scotland’s most expensive place to buy a home.
So stop reading and get searching, before you can’t afford a garage…
Welcome Nestorooglers!
As we’ve covered before, the pace of innovation in online geography is relentless! Yesterday we witnessed another step forward: our friends at Google now allow dynamic data updates via their maps API. This means it’s very simple to paste a dynamically updating map with property onto any web page. Never ones to sit on the geodata sidelines, we’ve whipped up support for this in our Nestoria KML feed, as you can see below with this example of homes for sale in Canterbury (note: it will take a few seconds to load). Drag the map and watch properties ‘automagically’ appear. Very cool, and very easy - the entire code is below, literally 3 lines.Fellow Nestors!
We’re continually scanning the darkest reaches of the internet to find new technologies that might make finding a home easier. This of course means keeping a keen eye on innovation in the online mapping sector, and speaking with thought leaders. This week we were very pleased to see that Microsoft significantly upgraded their Visual Earth product. Amongst the improvements, you can now easily dump data onto an MS Live map via GeoRSS or KML. Put simply, if you like you can browse properties to buy or rent from Nestoria on MS Live. Here’s a screenshot of an example where we’ve taken the GeoRSS feed of properties for sale in Dover and very easily layered it onto an MS Live map:
- Yahoo’s publicly available User Interface library and the community behind it make “wow”ish frontend development easier than ever.
- Facebook’s platform allows anyone to simply and easily reach exponentially growing Facebook audience (For those late to the party, please check out the Nestoria Facebook apps). All across the world other social networks (including Google’s orkut) are racing to follow Facebook’s example.
- Amazon continues to extend and improve their distributed storage and server architecture.
Where will this all lead? Impossible to say, but it is clear that internet users everywhere are the winners.
Fellow Nestorlonians,
here at Nestoria we’re addicted to feedback and continually trying to make it as simple as possible to find your next home. We love it when property searchers take the time to fill our our feedback form and let us know what they think of Nestoria. We thought we’d once again give you a peek behind the curtain by showing you some of mails we get on a typical day: “I would like to list my house on your site”Sorry, we don’t accept listings directly from owners. Why not, you ask? The reality is that, although people do seem to enjoy slagging off the estate agent industry whilst at the pub with their mates, very few people actually want to face the challenge of selling their own home without professional help. After all, it’s the largest financial transaction of your life. In the UK less than 5% of homes are sold without an estate agent. Unfortunately allowing individuals to enter all sorts of free form data (like property descriptions) leads to all sorts of problems around data quality. For anyone who disagrees I advise you to spend a few minutes browsing property ads on Gumtree. There are of course some well written gems (more than a few of these are actually from estate agents!) but there is also page after page of spam, ads for properties with poor or incomplete descriptions, and ads without pictures. Filtering property listings like these is at the heart of the value we believe we add to the home searching process. “I want to be able to search only for properties with a garden, or with XXX or without YYY”
We know. We’re currently testing this feature, and getting some useful feedback. We hope to get it out to a wider audience in the near future. “Why are homes so expensive in London?”
We have no idea. We agree, it’s insane. “I’m an estate agent and would like to display my listings on Nestoria.”
Great, we’re here to help. Get in touch. Please include information like your contact details, how many ‘live’ UK residential listing you typicallly have (by ‘live’ we mean available to be bought or let, not ’sold’ or ’sold subject to contract’), and what (if any) software you use to manage your listings. “I found my home using Nestoria!”
Very cool. Glad it worked out for you. Good luck in your new home. “I hate Nestoria!”
Sorry to disappoint. If you’re going to take the time to write, why not help us improve by telling us exactly what it is you dislike. “I love Nestoria!”
Bummer. Thanks for the vote of confidence. We still have a long way to go, so please let us know what we could do better. “I can sell you viagra! Great rate!”
Right now we’re set as far as viagra goes. Nevertheless, if it does turn out we need a little help, you’ll be the first one we call. No, really, we’re all set - you can stop emailing us every day.
Fellow Nestormanos,
Good news for those of you using python to access the Nestoria property search API. The publicly available library has been updated to be compatible with the newest version of the API. In other API business, one question that seems to come up repeatedly is whether there was a way to randomly select listings. There is, just search for the place name of “random”. This will generate a response with a location name chosen at random from our database of UK or Spanish placenames (depending on which country you query). Enjoy, and please keep the questions coming.People are always asking us where the name ‘Nestoria‘ comes from.
Ask and ye shall receive. Prepare yourselves for a journey that will take you through space, time, London, and latex.
When we were looking to set up the company in the UK, we did all kinds of research into what would be an appropriate name for our baby, the easiest way to find UK property. We trawled through page after page of books claiming to provide everything we needed to make that once in a lifetime decision. Alas 20,000 suggestions later we were still unconvinced. We needed something with real pizzaz, something weighty and meaningful.
So we donned our latex gloves and headed for the British Museum’s most secure and sacred vaults. Through a personal academic contact, we were able to gain access to thousand year-old texts barely scoured by the human eye. During our fourth day in the vaults, whilst unbundling yet another tome, a small scrap of yellowed parchment swayed to the floor.
Our friend at the museum quickly identified the note to be from the hand of Vincentius the 3rd. Translated, the note told of expeditions to Londinium and the many wonderful new experiences to be had there. Vincentius made heavy use of derivations of the ancient Latin stem ‘nestor’ which has been translated to mean ‘to search and find’.
With the team running low on food and water, we took this as a sign. The site must be called ‘nestor’. Not catchy. Nestoria. Much better.
And so there you have it, the solid, precious history of the name ‘Nestoria’.
PS
Anyone who says otherwise, comment away. Anyone suggesting we named ourselves after an Argonaut can go straight to the feedback form.
Fellow members of the Nestorese empire,
As devout readers of this blog will know, for the last week we’ve been testing ’sort by newness’ on some users. The feedback and metrics are very positive and today we’ve rolled this feature out to everyon. Enjoy.
Of course, the end of one test is the start of another. The new test is an algorithmic change and thus not ‘visible’ in the traditional sense. We hope that you’re finding homes to buy and rent faster than ever.
Join the 