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Comment by danielheath | Hacker News Reader

Main dev on the project here (I work for rea-group.com who run www.realestate.com.au, but they've given me a years secondment to the project).

Back in 2013 a team at our hackday implemented the precursor to this app, and the leadership team were super impressed.

It's been amazing working so closely with the sector (we meet/do user testing with representatives from lots of organisations).

This is my first project with react / es7, but I've built a few rich client webapps before. React is definitely the best developer experience I've had with client-side frameworks.

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A bit of data feedback for you, getting to this page on your app:

https://askizzy.org.au/category/have-your-say/in/2601-Austra...

Suggests that the Commonwealth Ombudsman does not have an office in Canberra. They actually do though[1].

Cool project, good luck with it!

1. http://www.ombudsman.gov.au/pages/contact-us/our-offices/ind...

Thanks for the feedback, gealian! I've let our data team know about the problem.

It's been fantastic having Daniel on board for this and really great of REA to help with resourcing the project.

This is an amazing and inspiring initiative and I wish I'd been involved somehow. I'm not sure whereabouts in Australia you're based, but if you're in Sydney I'd love to buy you both a beer :).

Hi Barb, We're based mainly in Melbourne, likewise if you're ever down this way make sure you get in contact!

Also, if you do want to be involved, send us a message - support@askizzy.org.au

One thing I do miss in React is having a baked in data layer. I know know, React is the V in MVC, but still - you see it being compared to Angular, etc all the time.

Ember's ember-data package is so good. I miss it most of all.

I don't think baked-in is a great idea unless the data layer is really good.

There are plenty of data-layer implementations that work with react, but none are good enough yet (imo) to be the canonical way to do it.

Well done on the project from another Aussie dev! Agreed on React/ES7 -- absolutely amazing for rich-app development.

Unrelated, but REAXML has taken years off my life ;)

Anything with XML in it would do that to you...

Offtopic, but I don't suppose you could provide any insight into why real estate websites ask for search filters and then completely ignore them?

(eg. if i search for a max limit of $750K, top page of results will all be offer 800k+ sites? - Why let me set a max then ignore it?)

As someone who has built many real estate sites, this is done on purpose as a "fuzzy-logic" search as agents feel anyone willing to spend $750k for a home can be easily induced to spend 5-10% more if the right property catches their fancy.

Yeah but what this actually does is "great, since they competency ignored my search criteria, I will no longer use this search"

I know what my budget is - I'm not going to search for 10% under that in the hopes that the fuzzy logic brings up exactly what im looking for

If I have wiggle room, I make my max inclusive of the "x% more if it catches my fancy". It's unintuitive to search for "max $680k" to ensure results are within a $750k budget. As someone who uses real estate sites, this is enough friction to send me elsewhere, where, as tamana says, my preferences and ability are respected. Why not add a slider bar for "perfect place" wiggle room amount/percentage, with a 10% default, but which the user can set to zero?

I like this a lot, and will do my best to convince my agents to allow me to implement this idea...

Thanks! I very much look forward to seeing this out in the wild.

Exactly, and the next problem is that it seems like EVERY real estate site does this. I have not found a SINGLE site in Australia to look for rent OR buy real estate, that actually filters based on what I enter. They are all useless

So, they have zero respect for their users' intelligence or preferences.

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