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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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Nestoria.es Update

Hola Nestorianos,

It's now been four months since we launched Nestoria in Spain and we thought it might be a good time to update you, our loyal readers, on our progress. On the one hand, we have seen a nice growth in usage (despite the fact that August is traditionally a holiday month in Spain). On the other hand it is clear we still have a lot to learn.

As you know, we continually track many, many metrics to try to understand how we could make the experience of finding a house to buy or rent even easier. We divide these metrics into a few broad topics that we'll go into here.

  • Comprehensiveness: we're very happy to report that we've grown a lot since our launch. Our database now contains over 550,000 properties to rent and buy from great partners like Atrea-BBVA, Globaliza, Idealista, Inzoco, Ivive, Kyero, Portae, SacaCasa, Suvivienda (El Mundo), Urbaniza, Yaencontre. Many thanks to all of our partners for their trust in working with a start up. We hope the list will continue to grow in the coming months

  • Relevancy: We believe relevancy consists of two pieces. Correctly determining the location you are interested in, and then determining the best properties to show you for that area. We have had to learn a great deal about Spanish geography. A very, very simplistic example: the metro station Bilbao in Madrid is not the same thing as the city Bilbao. These are the core challenges a property search engine needs to dominate, and one we work on continually.

    Of course, once we have identified the correct area, we then need to fine tune Nestoria Rank our ranking algorithm.

  • Usability: By usability we mean is the site fast, understandable, and easy to use. We're continually working on improving these things. We were very pleased to see our homepage gets a score of 94 (out of 100) using yslow the new speed measuring tool from Yahoo!. Like in the UK, we've recently rolled out improved slider technology

    Specifically for Spain we've added more local content; property searchers are now able to see nearby train stations and hospitals.

    Just like in the UK we've also built new ways to access Nestoria, like our google mapplet and our Facebook application - which we believe was the world's first non-English Facebook application.

    We know the work on usability is never finished. We can always make the site faster and easier to use. We also know we don't have all the answers, which is why we offer our API to allow everyone to experiment with different ways of presenting Nestoria results. Our recent Hack contest was won by two Spanish developers.

Overall, we are encouraged by the positive feedback we've had over the last few months. Please keep your comments coming. We've completed only the first mile of a long journey and have a lot more work ahead of us. The mountain of data is growing rapidly, and properly analysing it will be a challenge.

As our database has grown, more and more we are facing the challenge of determining how to rank the many properties we have. We have been experimenting with many algorithms and have learned a lot. This will remain be a key focus in the coming months. For example, we're aware that now we are faced with duplicated properties from several sources, as you can see here:

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Clearly this is a terrible user experience and one we are working to fix. Other items on our upcoming to do list include adding the ability to filter by 'keywords', for example to specify that you want to see only houses with gardens, or parking. More on this soon.

Okay, time to get back to work. If this post has raised your interest (and you speak Spanish), I invite you to subscribe to our Spanish blog, otherwise we'll keep you posted here every few months.

Filed under  //  nestoria international  
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Posted by Nestoria UK 
 

nestoria.es Launch Coverage

Wow, this week's launch of Nestoria in Spain has generated a fair amount of buzz on the old interweb.

We've had coverage in English in the UK on and some coverage in the US over on Web 2.0 For Real Estate Pros.

As you might expect there was a fair amount of Spanish coverage, here are a few examples:And, not to be out done, there was also a bit of coverage in Basque.

It will be a while before we turn our attention to another new European market, but it was good to see we are also already becoming known in the German speaking property blog world and amongst French property bloggers.

One final bit of good news, you no longer have to just read about the launch of nestoria.es, you can now get your own free and easy co-branded version for your website. Read the details on our Spanish blog or go straight to the implementation guide.

Have a good weekend

Filed under  //  nestoria international  
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Posted by Nestoria UK 
 

Hola nestoria.es

Dearest Nestoria fans, today marks a big day for us, we've expanded Nestoria beyond the shores of the UK with the launch of nestoria.es !!!!

Media_httpstaticnesto_dreih

Why Spain?
Over the last few years Spain has been one of the fastest growing EU property markets, especially with new property developments. Given that some of the Lokku team comes from Spain it seemed natural to try to adapt our skills to the Spanish market.

As with the UK, we came to the conclusion that a vertical search engine like Nestoria is a useful tool for part of the property buying or renting experience. We look forward to working together with everyone in the Spanish online real estate sector to help make finding a property a simpler and less stressful process.

Some key points about our new child:
  • Over 250,000 listings of houses (adosados o chalets) and flats (pisos) to buy and rent. We've been able to partner with some of the biggest sites in Spanish online real estate to provide property searchers with one of the most comprehensive databases online. (and will hopefully have more coming online soon).

  • We know many UK property searchers love the local information we provide about each area, and Spanish users are no different. We've added standard local content overlays like schools for all of Spain and public transport for the major cities. We've also been able to partner with some cool Spanish sites to give our new Nestoria a more human and fun feel. Check out photos from our friends at photo sharing site Panoramio and points of interest submitted by the users of Tagzania. Finally, we support the internet revolution by allowing you to see free wifi from the foneros. Of course this is just a start and we'll be adding more (and more relevant) local content over time.

  • Besides our standard web interface, we of course offer RSS feeds and our webmaster tools in Spanish. Help yourself to our customisable Property Lists and our DropIn maps for your website. Co-branded search isn't available yet, but will be by the end of this week.

  • Our full property data API is now extended to allow any developer anywhere access to UK and Spanish property data. We'll push out a few Spain specific tweaks by the end of this week.

  • Nestoria just wouldn't be Nestoria without a blog (and attentive readers like you). For those of you that habla un poquito please subscribe to our Spanish musings.

  • For now nestoria.es is in Spanish for Spanish speakers. We may in the future offer a search engine of Spanish property (second homes, vacation homes) for UK buyers. We may also offer versions in other languages like Catalan, Basque, Galician.

We know we have a lot to learn about property search in Spain (and indeed about property search in general).

As all long time readers of this blog know, we try to pride ourselves on all aspects of the search experience: relevance, usability, comprehensiveness, and freshness. We think we're off to a solid start, but it will take time for us to fine tune the Nestoria algorithms and user experience to provide the optimal Spanish homes search experience.

Nestoria isn't perfect, but you can rest assured that, just like in the UK, we're hard at work on learning from you, our users, to provide the optimal way to search for property.

Some of the proud parents:
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A big muchas gracias goes out to everyone who helped make this possible. It was a lot of work from the whole team here in London, and we had great assistance from a few folks in Spain. Making something as simple to use as a search engine is very complex.

As always we look forward to reading what you have to say, either via the Nestoria UK feedback form or en castellano.

Filed under  //  nestoria international  
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Posted by Nestoria UK