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Comment by klaaz0r | Hacker News Reader

I run two side projects atm but they are both becoming more and more the main job.

I am building a Zillow for Europe [1]. The real estate market in Europe is a big mess and for the past 10 years not much has happend so far in proptech because it was easy to rent/sell properties. Now things are changing and I see a lot more supply coming on the platform. So far rented out 40 apartments doing around 3k in profit a month. We focus primarily on overseas/expats right now

Another project I started with a good friend from Google is Webtastic AI [2] it's a lead gen platform that indexes large amounts of data and I am using simple ML models to clean it up and make sense out of it. It does around 1.9k a month now but we just launched 2 weeks ago so that looks promising. Thanks to google cloud we got 100k credits which makes it a bit more feasible because the startup costs are extremely high.

[1] https://homestra.com/ [2] https://webtastic.ai/

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Are you planning to deal with all the complexities that each market brings? For example, compare with one of the standard German property search websites: https://www.immobilienscout24.de/ and here are some things that I, personally, would or have used when searching for property that I don't immediately see on your site:

For apartments:

* Searching by floor (or below or above floor)

* Searching by presence/absence of elevator

For all property types:

* Searching by rented / unrented status (evicting tenants for your own use is hard)

* Searching by build phase, if you're interested in new-build properties

* Searching by build year (some people prefer Altbaus, some consider them the work of the devil)

* Searching by heating type (underfloor vs radiator)

* Searching by rooms, not bedrooms. In Germany, a 1-room flat is a Studio Apartment and doesn't have a bedroom.

* Display of and searching by fees when buying (typically this is searching for "no estate agent fee")

* Display of and searching by Warm & Cold rent when renting

* Ability to search by state & city (at a bare minimum, and note that state affects how much property tax has to be paid when purchasing)

I think most countries are going to have a lot of little quirks like this, and it's going to be a hard sell to get people to switch over until you've got a lot of these in place for each country. I know that I've used international sites like this in the past and ultimately abandoned them because they either made it too difficult to find what I wanted, or there just weren't enough properties on there.

There is a big update coming that is fixing/adding a lot of the features you mangent, build year etc. is added but I need to review harder on that.

Thanks for your feedback, really appreciated!

Ahh, cool, that's great to hear!

> I am building a Zillow for Europe [1]

As a European, I (at least) don't understand what this means - and therefore don't understand your offering, your USP?

What does/will Homestra offer, and how will it be different from e.g. Immobilienscout?

Good question, it's for expats/digital nomads/overseas buyers. Europe is very segmented and every country has it's own real estate classified sites, these are great for internal market but lack a lot of the features to help a foreign buyer. If you are a German looking for something within Germany changes are you will not use the site for a long time (lets hope in 10 years it's a different story!)

Can you add a map to Homestra? That’s the one piece of functionality that most overseas real estate sites are missing.

Already have it: https://homestra.com/map/

It's hidden on mobile because I didn't have the time yet to optimise it!

Thanks! I was also about to write, please add a filter for location, as I couldn't find it in the UI. I want to look for a specific city, not really for the whole country, which I thought was the only option for location filtering.

Both projects look like they are run by a team of 10+ people! Congratz on making them by yourself, that's very inspiring!

Thanks! I am teaming up with friends that are in marketing/sales, I learned the hard way that the whole romanticising of solo indiehackers is fun but you end up running in circles and never really have the time to do things perfectly. Now I have fun projects that are growing and working with amazing people

I agree, talent is triumphant. May I kindly ask where did you and your friends first meet?

How do the properties get onto homestra? Do landlords find your site and enter the data + pay you? Or is the model different?

We work with a lot of agencies/landlords mostly larger once now but making it more self serve in the upcoming months

That's super interesting! I actually started developing 'Zillow for Brazil' a couple of years ago for the same reason (Brazil realstate websites are a total mess - there's no option to show locations on a map!), but dropped the project due to lack of knowledge (I was just starting my journey in computer science) and also because I thought that tackling such a project would require a gargantuan amount of work (external integrations, indexing addresses, and so on). Besides, I had doubts whether I would be able to make a net profit from the website considering that GoogleMaps API is quite expensive for Brazil standards. Congrats!

Yeah domain knowledge/network is definitely needed, I am working with a friend who has that, it's a must in this field because it's almost set in the stone age.

Google maps was crazy expensive I went with Mapbox[1] for now which seems to have enough features and is less expensive.

[1] https://mapbox.com/

Brazillow

A filter for elevators would be super-helpful. I tried [1] but it seems broken.

after applying a filter i get a 404 (only fitler was bedroom size): https://homestra.com/houses-for-sale/?amount-of-bedrooms=2

On the note of filtering, why do you not have upper bounds on bedrooms/bathrooms? it seems like filtering for a 2 bedroom isn't possible because "2+" would give me a ton i am not interested in

Ohh that is interesting, how did you end up on that page, it should be https://homestra.com/list/houses-for-sale/?amount-of-bedroom... might have an old link somewhere :(

Ill add the elevator filter, thanks for your input!

followed your map link, changed the filter and hit `apply`. can reproduce it now too

Looks like the search model doesn't take the map into account when filtering, thanks for letting me know, will fix this ASAP

I wish you success and soon. We're house hunting from the US for a house in France. We visit the target city quite frequently but you really have to be registered with every agent and then hope that they contact you if the right property comes up. The last two times we bought a property in the US we found them via Zillow.

What kind of startup costs do you have for webtastic? Do you pay for data or scrape it?

We do everything manually, looks like most companies just buy data from each other and often it's not really complete. I had experience running large indexing services so that came in handy. Main costs come from storing large amounts of data, multiple databases etc.

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