Nestoria Blog

As you all know our focus here at Nestoria has always been to make it as fast and simple as possible to find your next home. We’ve been going strong now for over eight years and I’m proud to write that we now offer our service across nine markets. One of the things that keeps our work painfully hard challenging is understanding the nuances of each local market. The way that people search and the data available can vary significantly across those markets.

As such, we’re always looking for new tools and technologies to make the task even simpler, shich is why I’m very pleased to today announce that nestoria now supports searching for what3words codes. What3Words is a new technology developed by a fellow London tech start-up. We first became aware of them when founder Chris Sheldrick spoke at #geomob - the geo meetup we organize. The technology addresses (pun intended) the challenge of making locations easily shareable by carving the entire world into 3x3 meter squares and assigning each a simple three word code. Many of you may now be asking “why would I not just use the address when I refer to a location”, and that is a fair question. It assumes however that there is an address. In much of the world there is not. Even in the “developed” world there are many cases where an address doesn’t meet your exact need - for example when standing in the middle of a park.

I’ve had the pleasure of visiting our Nestoria India partners, and it can often be a significant challenge invovling several phone calls and stops to ask for directions to find an office in India. What3Words hopes to solve this pain point. If you have ever spent a sweaty minute in Mumbai traffic you will agree this is needed. Even in markets with well organized addressign schemes many place names are ambiguous. What3Words are unique and compact (ie easy to share via social media).

But wait, don’t we already have a consise way to precisely identify every location on earth? Is that not what longitude and latitude are for? Yes, long/lat works well for computers, but much less so for normal people. The use of simple words is what makes the difference. Words are easy to remember, easy to say, and easy for speech recognition software to identify. The service works in many languages, I encourage you to get the app and try it out.

So from today property searchers can enter their three word code in the local language and nestoria will show relevant properties for that location.

Here’s an example from Nestoria Brazil, searching for the w3w “garfo.serro.joga”:

It’s yet another in many small steps to making property search as easy as possible all across the world. Please let us know what you thing. Over on the Nestoria dev blog we have a post about how it all works, and we’ve opensourced some of the technology that makes it happen.

BTW - if geo innovation like this is your thing, please join us at the next #geomob on 16th of Sept, taking place at shared.device.lovely.