Fellow Nestoriacs!
Today we celebrate: We launched Nestoria in Spain one year ago!
Hard to believe it has been a full year since
we went online with our Iberian offering.
We still have a long way to go, but the our little property search engine has been well received by users, and after 12 months we’re closing in on 200,000 users a month (source: comScore March 2008).
Equally important we’ve built up a great list of partners. We are now aggregating listings from twelve of the top property portals in Spain, and we just added well over 50,000 listings
from a new partner yesterday. We also also keeping our focus on usability and metrics all along the way. In addition to all the experience and innovations that we introduced in the UK, specifically for Spain we launched
property search by neighbourhoods, like
Barris Maritims of Tarragona and by street name, eg.
Camino de la Mar en Benidorm. We’ve learned a lot along the way, and we still have much to learn. Please let us know if you have any
comments or ideas of what we could do better.
For those Nestoria fans interested in more details I recommend you subscribe to our
Spanish blog. You find a much
more detailed birthday celebration post there.
Future international expansion plans
We are now confident that our model can replicate to other countries. We are bracing ourselves for further expansion plans. In a few weeks time, we plan to launch
Nestoria Deutschland and
Nestoria Italia. More on that soon!
Hasta pronto, mi amigos!
Today we present a bit of Friday fun.
Like many websites, we closely monitor which terms and queries people are using in general web search engines like Google, Yahoo! and MSN to reach Nestoria. Typically these queries are quite standard - for example
“homes for sale near Stoke on Trent”. But sometimes we do see some odd and interesting surprises. We thought we’d share a few with you today:
- “why would people move to falconwood?” We say, why not? Falconwood is a nice place to live near Eltham, South East London. We at Nestoria are particularly fond of the Eltham Palace, an amazing residence of Stephen and Virginia Courtauld from the 1930’s. Are you in the market for something nearby? You may start your search by considering Eltham houses to buy.
- “how to find a decent property to rent in london” This is a tough question for a search engine to answer. It’s very hard to know what is meant by ‘decent’. Perhaps a three bedroom flat in a not outrageously expensive area of London like Fulham, or a house in one of the commuter paradises like Harpenden?
- “houses for sale 5,000″If ever there was a challenge to offer relevant results to our users, this is one. Can “any” property search engine in the UK find houses for sale for less than five thousand sterling? We try our best, but there are limits. We do however have hundreds of thousands of houses for sale across the UK.
In general we find that our users set the bar very high indeed. A recent Nestoria user searching for “houses for sale in chelsea” ended up filtering down to
properties in Chelsea for not more than 125,000. And we found one for him (or her), only it was a garage. Our technology may seem like magic, but not even we can accomplish the impossible task of finding a cheap home in Chelsea.
Have a good weekend.