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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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Points of Control

Nestoriamappers,

Beautiful maps of modern days are not supposed to be folded or rolled anymore. Even when they look like they came out of J. R. R. Tolkien book.

This map produced to Web 2.0 Summit is not related to fiction at all, but the real facts about our industry and what is happening between the major players of internet, hardware and handset manufacture and the online payments and commerce services. There are currently so many companies at all levels looking for the many ways they can get competitive advantages for the next years.    

This idea came from early conversations between Tim O'Reilly and John Battele back in mid march. "The narrative is so rich, it struck us that it lends itself to a visualization".

You can easily find two continents. The continent on the left it's all about locations, social media, and activity stream services. The one from the right is the continent of search, commerce services, and content. According to John, these two are not a Pangea for aesthetics purposes. All these masses interact to each other and you can see some white arrows indicating this interaction by clicking on the icons right above the map.

This map was built using the Google Maps API, it has two leves of zoom and you can even see the beaches of some territories.

(download)

Filed under  //  fun  
Comments (0)
Posted by Anton Abreu 
 

New OSM Maps on Nestoria with Cloudmade

Dear Nestorfuns,

Our true fans will know the "geo fun" feature that allows you to use our property search with OSM Maps.

Viral_panel

I am happy to report that we have updated this feature with brand new, customized maps curtesy of Cloudmade. Cloudmade allows you to create your own designs for OSM maps and integrate them on your website via their API.

Check out Spitalfields, London:

(download)

 


We are very pleased with the result, big thank you to the people at Cloudmade!

We hope you'll have fun playing with this new feature. Have a nice bank holiday weekend!

 

 

 

 

Filed under  //  fun   new features   openstreetmap   technical  
Comments (2)
Posted by nomsa 
 

Get the Scots while they're hot

According to a recent article, Scottish house prices are rising even faster than those in England... Surely this is the perfect time to grab a little hot cake before it burns up! Properties in Inverurie and properties in Greenock were said to see the highest rises, whilst properties in Edinburgh still tops the tables as Scotland's most expensive place to buy a home. So stop reading and get searching, before you can't afford a garage...

Filed under  //  fun  
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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.

Filed under  //  about us   fun  
Comments (0)
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.

Filed under  //  about us   fun  
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Posted by Nestoria UK 
 

The fun begins

We've just sent out the invites to beta testers. Big thanks to all the volunteers. We look forward to hearing what you think - positive or negative.

A teaser screenshot:

Media_httpstaticnesto_cqblc

Filed under  //  fun  
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Posted by Nestoria UK 
 

Why just talk like a pirate?

Ahoy!

Today is a very special day. Today is International Talk Like a Pirate Day.

Arrr, that's right me'arties...

My fellow pirates in the Nestoria ship/office were thinking, why just talk like a pirate when you can live the pirate life too. Life would be so much easier - steal whenever you're a little short of cash, drink plenty of grog and have a good hornpipe every now and then.

If all that sounds like a little too much effort, you should at least consider looking for your new abode in a town with historic pirate ties...

Avast landlubbers, get ye house hunting!

Iron Leg Henson

Filed under  //  fun  
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Posted by Nestoria UK 
 

UK rental property density

Greetings Nestorites,

Since our post two weeks ago about density of homes for sale across the UK we've had several requests for the same visual display but for properties to let. Who are we to argue with the demands of our readers?

The original image is available here, but we thought we'd use this as a chance not only to display some interesting geodata, but also to experiment with one of the coolest new geovisualization tools around: Yahoo!'s new MapMixer. MapMixer is a tool that allows anyone to easily overlay one map (in this case our image of UK rental properties) on top of another map (a traditional political map of Great Britian). Here's the result:

The overlay doesn't line up perfectly, but the opacity slider has a definite "wow" factor (and we're not just saying that because we also use Yahoo! sliders). See it in all it's glory over on the MapMixer page.

For those who are interested we've also posted maps of the distribution of property to buy and rent for Spain over on our Spanish blog.

Filed under  //  fun  
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Posted by Nestoria UK 
 

Density of homes for sale across the UK

Nestoria Fans!

As you know from recent posts, lately we've been thinking a lot about the mountain of data the Nestoria search engine generates. We've had a bit of feedback that bar charts and pie graphs might not be the most interesting way to represent geographic data (Steve, we hear you - maps are cool).

We hope to unveil some interesting ways to look at and draw conclusions for the data in due time. Nevertheless, here's a bit of a teaser we whipped up today by overlaying our database of half a million homes for sale on a plot of the UK:

Media_httpstaticnesto_ikhgd

At a glance we can see our database corresponds very nicely with UK population density.

In England properties in Central London clearly has the highest density, but we also have excellent coverage throughout the south east and in all major cities like (properties in) Birmingham, (properties in) Liverpool, (properties in) Leeds, (properties) in Newcastle, and (properties in) Portsmouth

In Northern Ireland (properties in) Belfast is easily visible. In Wales, major cities like (properties in) Cardiff and (properties in) Swansea stand out against the relative spareness of the center.

We can clearly see the nice density in major Scottish cities like (properties in) Glasgow, (properites in) Edinburgh, and (properties in) Dundee, contrasting with the blissful isolation of (properties in) the Highlands

Maps are fun.

Filed under  //  fun   technical  
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Posted by Nestoria UK 
 

London versus the rest of the UK

Dearest Nestoritians,

If, like the Nestoria team, you live in London, you spend much of your time contemplating the insanity of property pricing. Just when it feels like things can't get more expensive, they do. At times it seems to defy all logic. Are there really that many Russian billionaires and ex-Prime Ministers buying everything up?

We thought we'd take a look at some of the data of how users of Nestoria searching in London behave differently than users searching for homes in the rest of the UK.

The results of the London housing price boom are easily visible when we look at the price of properties that Nestoria users click on:

Media_httpstaticnesto_nzuwt

The curve is shifted much higher for London searchers with well over 5% of clicks in London for properties at prices over £1,000,000. Are these prices sustainable, especially given that financial bonuses in "the City" are likely to be lower this year than last?

Hard to say. Whatever the outcome though we here at Nestoria will be combing our data for ways to make finding a property as easy as possible. Likewise, we'll continue looking for more useful insights that can be gleaned from aggregated behavior data. Please let us know what types of data you, our valued readers, are interested in.

Filed under  //  fun  
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Posted by Nestoria UK