Tag Archive for 'metadata'

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.

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 - 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 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.