Nestoria Blog

Fellow Nestorphiles,

as the ancient adage goes, three things are important in buying a property: location, location, and location. We know finding your next home is inherently a “local” experience, and as such we rarely make a big deal about the fact that we operate Nestoria in multiple European markets. Nevertheless, as part of our annual summary series we thought it fitting to update you on our progress over the last year in the various other markets Nestoria operates it.

The major highlight of the year was certainly the launch this summer of Nestoria Italia and Nestoria Deutschland and in the months since we’ve been working hard to learn from users and improve the service in both markets. We still have a long path ahead of us, but we can also see and hear from the feedback we get that we’ve made steady progress to date. In Italy we recently partnered with local reviews site wetry.it, and have launched out tube map overlays for Rome and Milan. We’ve done the same for some of the major German cities (more to come!). Like in the UK, in Germany we’ve partnered with Qype to add relevant local data on search result pages. We’re currently doing some broader interface testing in Germany that we hope to roll out to all countries shortly.

Nestoria España was our first international offshoot, and has now been running for almost 18 months. Over the course of 2008 we managed to make big strides in product quality particularly comprehensiveness as we launched and extended partnerships with major property portals like Fotocasa, Portae, and others. For a tiny company like us it’s of course an honour to be able to work with such major established brands.

Overall the Spanish property market has experienced a chaotic 2008, and the environment is well documented by our Spanish country manager Javier Hernandez in a guest post over at Property Portal Watch. Similarly, Matteo has written an overview of the Italian market, and I’ve dashed of my thoughts on the German online property industry.

If this summary has whetted your appetite and you’d like to learn moreabout Nestoria in other markets we invite the multilingual amongst you to subscribe to our local language blogs be they in Italian, German, or Spanish. In each of the markets, like in the UK, we run an interview series with local thought leaders on the blog.

Finally, for anyone professionally involved in the international online real estate industry, I hope to see you in New York in early January for Inman’s Global Connect.