Show HN: Our new property search website for London - Locatable
locatable.com
locatable.com
When you click 'places' the 'cancel' button to close the popup doesn't work for me (Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:16.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/16.0 ID:20121010235235)
I added a place with a 20 minute radius, then realised I wanted to go back and make it a 30 minute radius. It wasn't obvious how to do that with the UI, I ended up adding another place by mistake.
When I have two places, if I choose place 1, adjust the time radius slider, then I choose place 2 I get a new popup and my previous settings change is discarded. Could the changes auto-save, like when you drag and drop the place marker?
I'd also suggest, after I've picked a price range, instead of the "Property listings will appear here - click anywhere in the orange areas to see what's available in that area." bit why not auto-click somewhere suitable, removing a step from the UI process?
Also, if I could have a house cost heatmap with and without travelcard costs, that would be awesome. At the moment it's easy to visualise travel distances, but a heatmap would let me visualise the travel distance-house cost trade off.
What's your source of train time data? Are transfer times taken into account?
However, as I've said elsewhere, improving the usability of those controls is a big issue for us, we're looking at all the comments we get. Thanks for your suggestions around this.
>>What's your source of train time data? Are transfer times taken into account? Train time data comes from the government's Naptan data set (http://data.gov.uk/dataset/naptan). Transfer times not yet fully accurate, it's on our to-do list.
But, and I'm sure you've heard this from other people, the biggest problem with finding properties in this town is that basically every single property shown on any website has already been rented. I'm a bit worried that your site will just be a nicer, cleverer interface to show me a whole lot of flats that aren't on the market any more.
But - I don't actually see a solution there. You've got a very apt description of the problem and of what the solution would look like, but I do think there's a big leap from identifying those to actually going to something that works. The critical point to get past is of course actually having a number of interesting properties listed on your site, which requires overcoming the awkward network effects inherent in that market which the real estate agents obviously have a massive interest in perpetuating.
But don't let me get you down - I'm a bit cynical about this after my last experience flathunting, but everyone I speak to hates the system at the moment and would love something better. There are a ridiculous number of real estate agents in this town which implies there must be an awful lot of money in the market - ample room for someone to seriously undercut them while offering everyone involved a better deal.
Best of luck!
A few issues/suggestions based on 5mins clicking around:
* Lose the 'label' field on each area the user picks - they're already choosing a search term for google maps, why can't you just use that?
* Having chosen two places and chosen some property parameters, the right-hand-side of the page contains two 'property' buttons: one grey, which does nothing, and one orange, which allows me to reset the parameters. The grey one is useless and confusing, lose it
* Having chosen these places and parameters (I chose 'crouch end' and 'dulwich'), I can't see any properties, just the standard gmaps lollipop icons on the map. I guess this is a bug? In any event it's unclear what I should do next - you'd lose me at this point
* There's a big transparent grey footer that doesn't contain anything - what's the purpose of that when you could just show more map?
HTH etc. Nice idea, will check back once in a while...
>>Having chosen these places and parameters (I chose 'crouch end' and 'dulwich'), I can't see any properties, just the standard gmaps lollipop icons on the map. I guess this is a bug? In any event it's unclear what I should do next - you'd lose me at this point * There's a big transparent grey footer that doesn't contain anything - what's the purpose of that when you could just show more map?
Sorry about that - this sounds like a genuine bug. The grey footer is meant to display some text that tells you what to do next (property listings will appear in that area once you click on one of the orange areas of the map). If you could ping me to let me know what browser/version etc. that would be much appreciated!
Apart from that, everything else comes under "search controls usability" which is one of our top priorities for improvement, we'll definitely be doing some more work on those.
Firstly, site looks great and seems to function well. We built a similar commute time search last year, our interface could definitely do with some work - but it's a feature I think is awesome and people use.
However, in my opinion, the real problem with property searching of the past 5 years has been data. The data quality is poor as letting agents aren't incentivised to keep it honest, and keep it current. After all, they want tenant leads of any sort.
And that's just the search side. When you start looking into how else you can save money and improve the system for tenants and landlords you'll realise you're only scratching the surface.
Hence, whilst it's an awesome tool, I think the whole sector needs to be improved first. Maybe you can limit your search to OpenRent listings, and then you'll be keeping tenants happy! ;-)
But seriously, good luck with it - and if you wanted to chat, you can catch me anytime via the email in my profile.
However, reputable property managers who are simply looking to find high quality tenants, we love to have. They can use our Rent Now system, tenants aren't ripped off, and they save money.
Our model is totally different, we do everything you need to let your property, the landlord does the viewings. It's not a case of undercutting, it's a case of improving the whole system for both sides.
Do you think it would be possible to add cycling as a variable?
As in... based on average commuter cycling speed of 14mph including lights, etc.
If so, then great I'll go and tell a load of cyclists about it.
I guess the next problem for you though is the chicken and egg of getting data in there.
We're also planning on integrating a lot more data - there's a whole load of open government stuff (think crime stats, schools data) in particular that we're looking at.
So they are enthusiastic about that not being a convenient place by public transport or car. Basically they can get really good value accommodation as not being near a train station has no impact on their ability to access an area.
Most cyclists I know (a lot of them) have congregated in the South East of London purely because of these factors.
This would be great. I moved to London last year and I had no idea where I should live. I ended up travelling all over the city looking at dodgy flats before I found a place that had all the things I wanted.
I could have avoided a lot of wasted time on thoughts such as "Elephant and Castle sounds like a lovely place"
One issue - when I enter a place and then a property, I click search and all is good. I then click Property again, which pops up, but the search results cover the "cancel/search" buttons on the Property page. Means I have to reload the site and start over. A button to close the search results, or closing them automatically on smaller screens could be a good thing (I'm on a 1366 x 768 resolution tablet). Unless such a function is there and it doesn't work on IE10.
Some functional enhancements would be great -
- In the Property search box it'd be awesome if I could filter by type (house/flat/etc).
- It'd also be nice to see a price heat map of not just the area covered by a place, but of a wider area around that place. A bigger house for the same money is an incentive for a longer commute.
Otherwise, awesome!
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It says that Highgate is 10 minutes away by road from Old Street. The 271 bus takes more like 40 minutes on a good morning. I don't think it could be done in 10 minutes even without traffic.
The AA route planner gives it as 20 minutes which is optimistic http://www.theaa.com/route-planner/index.jsp#fromNode=182600...
Enfield is 20 minutes from Old Street by road? I don't think so!
Were you to take the existing road times and triple them, you'd like get a more realistic circle IMO.
Even after clicking get started, I find the interface unintuitive to use.
The main problem though is the same as here in the US, nobody but craigslist has the data and everything else just has stale data which no matter how well or conveniently it is presented isn't useful. You have the same problem in London where the existing real estate agents are not in anyway motivated to share their data.
A huge problem is that properties that have sold are still listed a long time afterwards.
We've had to stop using online search helpers because of all of the false positives.
Will your site help with this?
[1] Take a look: http://www.openrent.co.uk
Unfortunately, by using Zoopla's listings, you still have the most annoying problem of showing flatshares and studios when looking for 1-bedroom flats.
Other than that, brilliant!
Good luck.