What is Nestoria?

Welcome to the Nestoria blog. Nestoria is a property search engine.

We offer the Nestoria property search experience in Australia, Brazil, France, Germany, India, Italy, Spain, and the UK.

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A proper milestone

Nestofolks,

You know, we love both cartography and measuring, and you need to be accurate in both. So please let us briefly recap that a milestone (from the Latin milliarium) is one of a series of numbered markers placed along a road or boundary at intervals of one mile or occasionally, parts of a mile. One mile, in turn, is a unit of lenght that, back in the Roman days, consisted of 1000 paces. Rarely the term milestone has been more appropriate.

We are in fact here to celebrate or 1000th post on our blogs! It only seemed yesterday Nestoria.co.uk could have been Nestoria.Ldn, and now look at us, serving property listings in 5 countries and counting, with France and Brasil coming up (it really depends on how they do in the World Cup). In our efforts towards being your favorite property search engine, we like to share with you what's up at our headquarters, talk about the things we like, the people we talk to, the improvements on Nestoria, and much much more. And, by doing so, we kept you entertained overall more than 1000 times, in 4 languages! Not bad, huh?

We would like to thank you readers for showing your support. And of course a big thank you to our users and partners.

(Hey, if you fancy joining our team, we're hiring!)

Image courtesy of Storuman on Flickr

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Posted by Matteo Starri 
 

Welcome Programmable Web readers

Today Nestoria was featured as a case study on Programmable Web a leading blog documenting the recent trend of online mashups, use of APIs, and all things Web2.0.

If the Programmable Web article brought you to Nestoria for the first time: welcome! Please give our UK property search a try and let us know what you think - what you like, but also what you we could do better. If you've got some programming skills please take our property API for a spin.

Big thanks to Programmable Web for showcasing the fact that interesting things are happening in the mashup space in Europe.

We're very pleased to be recognized. It's an exciting time to be working on the internet. We've been able to draw inspiration from and build on the work of so many great sites and tools like Google Maps, TheyWorkForYou, Tagzania, Panoramio, Geograph, GeoNames,New Popular Edition maps. and many others.

We've also created our own tools to distribute our data. For those more technically minded we just this week upgraded our API to provide more interesting data, but we also offer a full range of widgets and other tools for those looking for simple cut and paste solutions. Of course we also offer these same tools for our Spanish property search engine.

On a final related note you might also be interested in Google's use of Nestoria as a case study for use of Google Maps.

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Posted by Nestoria UK 
 

More from the mailbag

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.

Ok, enough for now. A big thanks to everyone out there on the old interweb who takes the time to let us know what they think and how we could do better.

Please keep the feedback coming.

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Posted by Nestoria UK 
 

Origin of the name 'Nestoria'

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.

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Posted by Nestoria UK 
 

Recent Nestoria Coverage

Nestoranians,

we know there are few things you dread more than a few days without the chance to learn more about your favourite UK property search engine so we thought we'd highlight some recent coverage of Nestoria on other blogs that you might not normally read.Big thanks to everyone for helping to spread the word about Nestoria. Hopefully this will sate your appetite for Nestoria news for a few more days.

Enjoy the rest of the weekend.

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Posted by Nestoria UK 
 

Where the clicks are (part II)

Fellow Nestorvanians,

A bit of feedback has reached us that last week's post about the click distribution on Nestoria. It seems that the post, while insightful, was perhaps a mis-titled, in that we didn't actually discuss where, in the geographic sense, users are clicking. Apologies. We offer today's post as a correction.

Here you see the geographic distribution of all property clicks of Nestoria UK users in July of 2007:

Media_httpstaticnesto_drizq

So what's interesting about this? Well, a few things:
  • Though we initially launched Nestoria last summer with coverage only of properties in Greater London, London and the South East now account for only 25% of our usage.
  • It looks like we have room to improve in Wales. Perhaps we do need a Welsh language property search?
  • In general, we're pleased with the healthy distribution across all parts of the UK.
Of course, if you think we're underserving your particular corner of the realm, do please get in touch and let us know how we could improve.

In closing, we see there is interest in us providing this data in a more regular and more easily digestable format. Rest assured Nestoria fans, we hear you, and are working on it. Watch this space!

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Posted by Nestoria UK 
 

Where the clicks are

Fellow Nestorstanis,

As you know we take a very analytical approach to trying to understand user behaviour on the Nestoria site. We then feed that information into our product design process. Indeed, one of the technical achievements we're most pleased with is our internal metrics/analysis system. We literally measure every click on the site.

For a long time now we've mulled ways to present some of this information back to the users - or anyone who's interested really - in an aggregated form. We have several projects along these lines and we hope that in the coming weeks and months there will be more to see along those lines. The challenge of wrangling the data becomes more difficult as the volumes increase. While we can't reveal exact numbers, Comscore reported record nestoria.co.uk traffic in June, and we are now generating multiple hundreds of thousands of click outs each month, so the data volume is becoming non-trivial.

Nevertheless, in the spirit that "good today is better than perfect tomorrow" we thought that we'd whet your appetites with some basic information.

Here for example is the break down of what type of property listings users clicked on in July 2007.

Media_httpstaticnesto_xrrhs

We see that we have a fairly even distribution between rentals and sales, with flatshares making up only a tiny portion of user interest.

Looking more deeply at homes for sale click behaviour, we break that down by price:

Media_httpstaticnesto_ioncz

As one would expect most of the action is at the more affordable end of the market, but even at high price ranges there is still significant volume.

Perhaps we're just data geeks, but we enjoy looking at pictures like this. We hope you do too.

Coming soon, a comparison of behaviour in the perverse property market that is London versus the rest of the UK.

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Posted by Nestoria UK 
 

Economist coverage of vertical search

For those that haven't seen it, this week's edition of The Economist has an article about vertical search. Though the article focuses mainly on the health care vertical in the US, it does a good job of summing up the advantages (and challenges) of vertical search for the layman. One quote in particular stands out:

In short, relevance is king, says Monique Levy of Jupiter which suggests that a vertical search-engine that successfully pairs a broad target market with a complicated topic can do well

We couldn't agree more, which is exactly why we spend so much time working on relevancy. We've developed our own algorithm, called Nestoria Rank, which we use to show the best results for a user's search for a home to buy or rent. We occasionally document our work on Nestoria Rank here on the blog. We'll post another update about some of the new tweaks we're currently working on in a few weeks.

It's very encouraging to see someone else recognizing the importance of relevancy.

On a related note, long time Nestoria Blog readers may recall our first ever post in June of last year: "Vertical Search, What's That?"

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Posted by Nestoria UK 
 

Nestoria turns one year old!

Dearest Nestonauts!

This week is the one year anniversary of the launch of Nestoria in the UK!

Hard to believe it's only been a year. We've come a long way. For those that don't recall when we originally launched, Nestoria had only about 50,000 listings and covered only London. There was no API, no tools for webmasters, a very limited set of local content, you couldn't use the map to search, and our approach to relevancy was in it's infancy.

To celebrate our progress over the last year the Nestoria team decided to take an afternoon off last week and head to the centre of the world: Greenwich and the Prime Meridian.
The Nestoria team at the Prime Meridian
Media_httpstaticnesto_subhe

Proof
Media_httpstaticnesto_adoqu
It was a great afternoon. Fun to look back on what we've accomplished (we now have over 800,000 listings in two countries, 100,000's of users each month, and were recently cited by Google as the case study for the use of their maps API) and to focus our minds on the tasks ahead.

We know we still have a long way to go. Which is why we invite all our loyal blog readers and Nestoria users to join us this Thursday evening at 19:00 to discuss our progress and what we could do better at the John Snow pub in Soho. And if you can't join us there we of course invite you to get in touch via the old feedback form.

We hope to see you there!

* Some of you might be wondering why the GPS device records 0.082 degrees west, which is about 100m off. We were worried also. The explanation is that the officially the prime meridian is no longer 'earth bound' or defined by anything on earth. See Wikipedia's explaination (first paragraph in the 'description' explains it). All is well.

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Posted by Nestoria UK 
 

BBC recommends Nestoria

When we started Nestoria last year we knew we could provide UK property searchers with a compelling way to find homes. We've worked hard and our continual focus on metrics and testing makes us confident that with each day we're able to improve the quality of the property search experience. We know we still have a long way to go (please let us know how we could improve), but it's very rewarding for us to see that other people appreciate the work we've been doing.

Recently the BBC began showing Nestoria as a "recommended site" whenever someone searches on the BBC for a property related query. Here's a screenshot:

Media_httpstaticnesto_tcbjb

Big thanks to the BBC editorial staff for this vote of confidence.

We're only in position 3, but the reason we're so pleased with this recognition is that the requirements for becoming a recommended site are strict. The first of the many requirement is "The overall quality of the website must match or exceed expectation." This validates all the work we've done on Nestoria Rank and all the other small and often invisible, but very important pieces of creating a compelling property search engine.

Our one comment to the team over at BBC for improvement: deep linking. When someone searches for "houses for sale in Nottingham" why not offer them a link directly to the Nestoria "Houses for Sale in Nottingham" page, rather than directing them to the Nestoria homepage? We want people to find the information they need as quickly and easily as possible. As such, we've intentionally designed our URL structure so that it is as easy as possible for anyone to link directly to relevant search results of properties. And of course it's all fully documented. Please BBC, help your users by sending them to exactly the information they're looking for.

Do you agree with the BBC that Nestoria provides a first class property search experience? If so, why not get your own version of Nestoria for your website?

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Posted by Nestoria UK