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Comment by chillydawg | Hacker News Reader

Nice. Me and two partners had something like this in 2012. We tried to sell it to zoopla/rightmove/etc but none of them were interested. We integrated it with stuff like supermarkets, clinics, gyms, etc and allowed you to build quite complex searches with multiple locations and constraints. It was called locatable.com and is now thoroughly dead. I wish you luck monetising this somehow!

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We've actually had commute time search at OpenRent (https://openrent.co.uk) since launch (2012) - It's less prominent on our homepage now, and somewhat unloved, simply because the majority of people seem to ignore / not want it.

The key to winning in the property space is definitely non-obvious, but I love to see innovative search tools popping up from time to time. Long may it continue!

Do you want to buy a much better version? :D

Feel free to reach out (email in my profile)

See also: Mapnificent

https://vimeo.com/16362921 https://www.mapnificent.net/

It is very interesting hat you had a similar idea, would you like to share your experience with me ? If so, can you send me an email at : contact@oalley.fr ?

Do you plan some kind of API?

I'd love to have such a feature in RightMove or Zillow, to be able to search properties within say 30 minutes drive from work, instead of just faffing around in Google maps trying to guesstimate.

Would have been very useful to me back when I was buying my house. But I'm not sure that people like Rightmove etc. aren't on the side of property sales agents, who prefer customers that have less information. Rightmove is just a lead generation tool for an estate agent. Once someone walks in the door, they can bring them around to two or three properties, rather than just the property they saw on the website. Information about how hard it is to get to work, to a supermarket, etc. are just reasons not to buy.

Would be super helpful for corporate offices. Input a list of employee home addresses and find commute time isoclines, or locations which minimize mean or median commute.

Did you always have in mind that you wanted to sell it to zoopla/rightmove? What was your initial pain point that caused you to develop your idea?

We had a rough plan of getting into the rental\sales listing game, using our map and search engine as the killer feature. Turns out to make any headway at all in that game you need big bucks as it's entirety marketing driven. We had way more features than this product and made exactly 0 money from it. We were pretty young and commercially incompetant though.

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