Tag Archive for 'API'

House prices widget - feedback needed

Published by Ed on February 12, 2008 in API, New Features and tools. 2 Comments

Greetings fellow members of the Nestorinese Empire,

today we need your help. As we announced a few weeks ago, we now offer historic house price data via our API. As an addition to the existing Nestoria house price widget - which shows the current average asking price for an area - we will soon be launching a widget that shows historic price trends for any area.

The problem we face is the same one we are confronted with in designing our property search results page: on the one hand we have a wealth of information, on the other hand we need a simple intuitive way to present it for the benefit of users. Thus, we turn to you, our loyal blog readers, for some help. Please let us know what you think of the following potential designs (note that the data is made up in all cases).

potential widget designs

As you can see each design has some pros and some cons. Some show more information, some less. Feel free to give us all the feedback you have. Perhaps you think these are all rubbish and you’d like to see something else altogether? Regardless of your opinion, many thanks for your help. We do value all the contributions we get, even if we can’t act on all of them immediately.

For those readers new to Nestoria, this widget will be just the most recent of our many tools for webmasters. Please check them out and let us know what you think.

Nestoria API: Fresher than ever.

Published by Ed on February 7, 2008 in API. 0 Comments

Greetings fellow Nestorites!

We know that one of the biggest complaints about searching for property on the internet is that the dream house you find is then gone when you contact the estate agent. This issue, we refer to it as freshness is a very difficult challenge. Without going into too much detail, the problem is not so much technical as it is simply refective of the dynamics of the industry.

Nevertheless, we are doing our part to solve it. We clearly label all of our listings with an indication of how old they are and a few months ago we began allowing users to sort listings by age. We know this doesn’t solve the actual problem, but we hope it’s a start.

Today we’ve extended the information we have about the listings age to our API. Each listing requested via the API now returns a field updated_in_days which is a number representing how many days since the listing last had a significant update like a change in price. The number is rounded to the nearest 12 hours (ie 0.5 would mean the listing is less than half a day old).

As ever, the full technical details can be found on our property search API help pages. Please contact us with any questions you have regarding the API (or anything else for that matter)

Enjoy!

Nestoria API - historic average price data, rental widgets

Published by Ed on January 15, 2008 in API and New Features. 3 Comments

Greetings Nestoronians!

A few updates about the Nestoria API. Specifically, the average house price data we launched a few months ago has now been augmented in two ways. First of all, we now return not just monthly price averages, but also quarterly price averages. Secondly we are now returning data for multiple months. This means it would now be easy to make cool graphs showing price trends over time, using the new Google Charts API or YUI Charts library (or, obviously, some other visualization technology of your choice).

We’ve seen some interesting experiments with the average house price data, the most notable of which is Precio de vivienda by Jesús Barrio in Spain. His tool uses our API to allow anyone to compare house prices in any two cities in Spain and displays them via a Google Chart. A very nice and useful site well worth checking out, and one we’d love to see someone emulate for the UK. Here’s a screenshot:

Unfortunately right now we’re only offering the historic data for the UK, but rest assured our ace team of data crunchers are hard at work compiling this data for Spain as well and it will soon be available.

A few other related announcements:

By popular demand we now support rental price widgets. See an example showing the average prices for rentals in Islington. Learn all about our average house price widgets for your blog or website.

Also, we’re aware that the external link to the PHP library is, unfortunately, not working. I’ve been informed that it should be back online shortly. Apologies for the outage.

As always, enjoy the API and please keep the feedback coming.

Nestoria Yahoo! Widget version 2

Published by mtm on December 19, 2007 in API and tools. 1 Comment

Nestoria search results always ready and updated on your PC at the stroke of a key?

That is now possible with the new Nestoria Yahoo! Widget created by Oleg Lavrovsky unsing the Nestoria API. (Thanks a lot Oleg!)

Apple-computer users already know the Apple Dashboard. The Yahoo! Widgets are very similar *), but they work for both MS Windows and Apple computers. Once installed you also get a clock, calculator, weather, stock quotes and hundreds of other install-able applications accessible on your desktop. Oh, and the by pressing ‘F8′ on your keyboard you can show and hide them (I did say ’stroke of a key’ :) ).

The Nestoria Yahoo! Widget version 1 got downloaded 949 times. To install the new widget go to the Yahoo! Widget Gallery and search for ‘nestoria’. You will see a large yellow ‘Get it!’ button. Click it.

The widget can be minimized (just the searchbox), mini-view (shows 3 results) and full-view (shows 8 results). It allows sorting results by price, newest, relevancy and keeps a list of your previous searches.

screenshot of Nestoria Yahoo! Widget

screenshot of Nestoria Yahoo! Widget

All feedback is welcome.

*) There is some controversy if Apple just copied the ideas from Konfabulator (now Yahoo! Widgets)

UKPropertyVision.com - ambient property browsing

Published by Ed on November 26, 2007 in API, Google Maps, fun and web 2.0. 4 Comments

Hello Nestormanos,

We know that many of you are advanced users perched over your keyboards (or iphones) at the bleeding edge of internet innovation. So you no doubt saw the trend over the last few months of ‘vision’ sites - starting with David Troy’s twittervision and flickrvision, and most recently copied by sites like Wikipedia Vision.

Like many of the most beautiful ideas - the concept is very simple. The vision sites hook into the API of the original site and display a continual stream of random data on a map. But the outcome is very powerful. It’s somehow very entertaining and soothing to watch the map glide from point to point in the continual stream of photos and locations.

We were thus delighted to see our own Nestoria API employed to create UK Property Vision. Here’s a screenshot, but to truly experience it you’ll simply have to click.

UKPropertyVision

For you property addicts out there, welcome to paradise. Kick back, grab a glass of something nice, and just let the homes dance across the screen.

No need to worry - here at Nestoria we’ll keep our laser sharp focus on delivering you a relevant results from our comprehensive database of homes. But we know a search engine like Nestoria isn’t the only way people want to look at property. It’s great to see a clever use of the API to present a different interface.

Enjoy!

Nestoria API - version 1.12 - property metadata

Published by Ed on October 30, 2007 in API and New Features. 8 Comments

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.

Nestoria API: deprecating old versions

Published by Ed on October 24, 2007 in API. 2 Comments

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.

Nestoria API: updated python library

Published by Ed on October 11, 2007 in API. 2 Comments

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.