Archive for the 'New Features' Category

Ciao Nestoria Italia!

Published by Ed on July 3, 2008 in New Features, about us and partnerships. 3 Comments

Fellow Nestorionos!

Great news, we’ve just gone live with Nestoria Italia!

Nestoria Italia

Just as in the UK and Spain, anyone hunting for a home to buy or rent can now use our simple interface to start their house hunt. In total we have over 250,000 properties all across the country. We’ve partnered with strong on and offline classifieds brands like 123Case, Casa.it, Idealista, Repubblica, Casaclick, Immobiliare, and Trovocasa, and of course we will look to add more partners in the future (as we’ve recently done in the UK).

A big grazie to all the beta testers for the valuable feedback. Please keep it coming (via our Italian feedback form - we know there are still some very rough edges and we still have a lot to learn about how Italians want to search for their next home. There will be lots of fine tuning in our future. But the basics are there:

We look forward to learning from our users and partners! If you’re interested in learning more, yesterday I did a brief interview over at Renthusiast that goes into a bit more detail.

Happy house hunting to our Italian friends!

Puts down celebratory glass of prosecco and shuffles back to desk to work on nestoria.de launch.

Merseyrail on Nestoria

Published by Ed on June 26, 2008 in New Features. 0 Comments

Fellow Nestorvolk!

As regular readers of this blog will know we take local content seriously here at Nestoria, one needs only check our gallery of local data pins. We’ve done our best to be comprehensive, partnering with many interesting sites across the web like They Work For You or geograph.org. So we immediately sprung into action when an anonymous user got in touch via our feedback from to tell us:

“There are over 60 Merseyrail stations throughout the Merseyside area and services extend as far as Chester, these should be included in your info.”

At first there was disbelief in the team as we thought we had gathered the data of every tram and local rail system in the UK (we have Birmingham, Manchester, Nottingham, Newcastle, and many others). We thought we had them all, but we were wrong. Today we’re pleased to announce that users will find yet another local content pin on Nestoria! Behold:


the Nestoria Merseyrail pin: Merseyrail pin

See an example if you search for homes for sale in Birkenhead.

Birkenhead

Big thanks to the user who tipped us off. Please keep the suggestions coming. For the trainspotters amongst you, learn more about the Merseyrail, for the rest of you happy house hunting!

Who’s up for some international beta-testing?

Published by Ed on June 13, 2008 in New Features. 3 Comments

Ciao Nestorianos!

Our international expansion plans draw ever nearer. We’re looking for a few German and Italian native speakers to take a peek at Nestoria Deutschland and Nestoria Italia before we open up to the public in a few weeks time. Expect a few rough edges, but otherwise we hope to offer the same simplicity of house searching that we present to house hunters in the UK and Spain.

Nestoria Europe

If you’re interested many thanks for your help and please get in touch via our online form, we’ll send you an invite in the coming weeks.

Manchester Congestion Charge

Published by Ahmed on June 10, 2008 in New Features, about us and what's hot. 0 Comments

First came road-charging in Durham, then the London congestion charge (+ extension) and now plans have been given the go-ahead for a similar scheme in Manchester.

We’re sure everyone knows what these are by now - systems put in place to charge motorists entering or present within a specific area, with the aim of reducing traffic congestion.

A few facts about the Manchester system:

  • Setup is expected to cost £2.8bn
  • Provisional launch set for 2013
  • Will consist of 2 ‘zones’ (one outer, one inner)
  • The outer zone will be drawn roughly around the M60
  • The inner zone will outline the city centre
  • Entry charges will only be triggered during the morning (07:00-09:00) or evening (16:00-18:30) and will be £2 for entering the outer zone plus a further £1 for the inner zone
  • Exit charges will only be triggered during the evening and will be £1 upon exiting each zone
  • Public transport capacity and links are expected to be increased to ensure alternatives for motorists

Map of Manchester Congestion Charging Zones - Credit: BBC

What does this mean for Nestoria users?

Those that have used Nestoria to search for aproperty in central London may well have seen a little London Congestion Charge Logo next to some properties. This is to let you know that this property is within the congestion charging zone. Why is this important? If you live within the zone, you get a 90% discount on the charge - not bad! There may also be other impacts - it would be more expensive for friends to drive to see you and so on.

We had this data up for London as soon as we launched, and even marked those properties in the London western extension before it went live, so that you could plan ahead.

We plan on doing the same for Manchester as soon as the zones are agreed upon - this should help you make the right decision about your next property, and make your search for the perfect nest that much easier.

Happy hunting!

Historic house price data on search result pages

Published by Ed on April 7, 2008 in New Features. 0 Comments

Fellow Nestorphiles,

following on our recent post about historic property price data widgets we’ve now added historic pricing information to our results pages, as you can see in this screengrab of a Nestoria results page for Bristol.

Screenshot of Bristol house price data on Nestoria

Please let us know what you think. Of course, if the design isn’t exactly your cup of tea you can always use our API to get the raw data yourself.

Nestoria hListing support

Published by Ed on April 3, 2008 in New Features, technical and tools. 5 Comments

Fellow Nestoris!

For some time now momentum on the internet has slowly been building for microformats and the semantic web.

More and more these data formats and technologies are moving from theory to reality, with recent adoption from internet giants like Yahoo! to innovative start ups like London-based Retangle (still invite only). The most recent beta version of popular internet browser Firefox supports microformats and may be a key step on the path to much wider adoption.

microformats

We here at Nestoria always have our eyes open for any possible new technology or technique that may help you find your next home more easily. Today we continue this tradition by rolling out support for the hListing microformat on our search result pages.

We should note, the format is still under proposal, and to our knowledge there’s only one known in-the-wild parser - so this is bleeding edge stuff that might be useful in the future rather than an amazing new functionality for property searchers today. Nevertheless, even the mightiest oak grows from the tiny acorn. No doubt future microformat application developers are grateful to find live examples. We look forward to playing our party in the future growth of the semantic web.

If interested, read about our other efforts to support open standards and the open source development community.

Single click house buying now live

Published by Ed on March 31, 2008 in New Features. 9 Comments

Ahoy Nestorizalek!

Sorry for our recent silence here on the Nestoria blog but this is definitely a case where good things come to those who wait. We’ve just gone live with a new feature that we think will revolutionise online property search: single click house buying!

After months of development we’re very happy to finally lift the curtain on this one. Here’s a screenshot showing how easy it is to buy a house in Brighton (click to enlarge).

nestoria payments

Many rounds of painstaking usability testing really helped us polish the details, for example, notice how you can jump straight to your shopping cart when you’re ready to check out:

shopping cart

As avid readers of this blog will know we do our best to make things simple. Making the purchase is trivial, just click on the ‘add to cart’ and away you go.

shopping cart close up

The entire process is just a few easy steps:

ecommerce flow

As you would expect there is a complete Twitter and FriendFeed integration, for those that want to grab a house while on the on the run. Unfortunately we didn’t have time to finish the Skype/VOIP voice recognition tie in, but it is in beta test and we hope to go live with that later this week.

No doubt a lot of you are wondering about the technology behind this innovation, and I can tell you it was not easy. Billing opens up all sorts of issues like refunding, gift certificates (so you can buy a house for someone else), and supporting multiple delivery options. Luckily we have been doing fairly well lately, and are saving a bit of money on rent so we’ve finally been able to afford good software rather than relying on our usual unsupported and unprofessional opensource stack.

In closing, a bit of delicious icing on the cake for all our loyal users: anyone who buys more than two houses in a single session in the next day will get a free pack of moo cards with interior shots of their new home.

Enjoy!

Embeddable House Price Charts

Published by Ed on March 18, 2008 in New Features and tools. 7 Comments

Hail Nestorcrats!

In these chaotic times of stock market ups and downs (good thing my contract stipulates that I be paid in gold bullion), it’s only natural that people are focused on the price of their most valuable asset: their home. A few weeks ago we asked you for feedback regarding the best way to display house price trends over time. Many thanks to those of you who came forward with your helpful suggestions.

Today we’re pleased to announce the newest version of our house price widget is now live. Using the recently released Google Charts API (thanks Google!) we’re able to

nestoria house prices widget

Adding the widget to your website or blog is literally as simple as cut and paste. Do a search on Nestoria for any area in the UK and at the bottom of the page there will be a link to ‘House Prices Widget’. Click on that link and you’ll be shown a page where you can get the chunk of code to cut and paste onto your website. Full details can be found on the house price widget page in our webmaster tools

Indeed, the first examples of the new widget have already been spotted ‘in the wild’. Here’s a screenshot from Lavenderhill.co.uk, a site, as the name suggests, about the Lavender Hill area of South London:

nestoria house price widget on Lavender Hill site

Of course, if you are traditionalist, you’ll be very pleased to know that we continue to support the original house price widget format, as seen here:

nestoria house prices widget

and for those who disagree with our design decisions, you of course have full access to the raw data itself via our API.

We are considering rolling out other widget designs in the future, so please do keep sending us your feedback. Likewise, we’re happy to feature other examples of the widget in the wild. Let us know.

Best of luck to all of you in these uncertain times (hint: buy gold!).

More photos anyone?

Published by Ed on March 11, 2008 in New Features and search. 0 Comments

Greetings Nestormaniacs,

Today we rolled out a tiny new feature to make your property searching even easier. In cases where we know it we now let you know if a listing has more photos than just the one we’re showing. See an example in this screen shot:

screenshot of more photos text

It’s all part of our never ending quest to bring you the most relevant search results. As with every tweak to the site, we’re keen to know what you think. Happy house hunting!

Testing, Testing

Published by Ed on February 28, 2008 in New Features. 1 Comment

Fellow Nestordanians,

as you know we try to take a scientific approach to the business. We’re often running test versions of our site exposed to only a percentage of Nestoria property searchers. Currently we’re testing making the pins on the map clickable and showing information in a little bubble (as many sites that use Google Maps do). Here’s a screenshot of a search for property in Reading:

Reading map with pins

Of course we measure the resulting changes in how people use the site in great details, but quantitative analysis only goes so far; we also welcome your qualitative comments. Please let us know what you think about this test, and any ideas you have for future usability tests.

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