Show HN: Revaluate – Real Estate Analytics | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Revaluate – Real Estate Analytics

revaluate.com

14 pointstimsegraves14 comments

Is this where your getting all your info https://data.cityofnewyork.us/

It's weird to me that your usage case on the site is for an individual person, but you only offer monthly subscriptions. In my experience people usually aren't looking for a place for more than 30 to 60 days, so why would I want to buy into a monthly subscription model with usage caps. Kind of annoying to have to sign up then almost immediately cancel.

A smaller developer or investor would probably be more interested in a regular subscription.

Yeah, some of the data comes from that site but we have a lot that actually isn't available anywhere online.

Agreed on the pricing. We're still trying to dial that in. I think a single 30 or 90 day access makes sense and then possibly a monthly subscription for real estate agents that want to provide reports to their clients.

Just FYI, the top nav rolls down when screen width is narrow: http://cl.ly/image/0k2j34200n38

Otherwise, this looks cool. I work in the real-estate space, so it's nice to see some innovative ideas coming through. You mentioned in another comment that you use public data but try to be very careful about what goes in. How do you do that? With humans or with automated tools?

Looks fantastic either way. Good luck. I'd like to see what you can come up with in other cities.

Thanks for the feedback! I actually did notice that issue you mentioned on an iPad this morning (adding a new link to the top yesterday broke it).

In terms of the data collection, currently it's a mix of manual and automated. We're pushing to get is all automated so it'll be easier to maintain and expand.

I think you should change your colors in the main page. Here: http://imgur.com/L7OBTOB I was thinking how weird it was that Lex. Ave had a very bad safety score... where in fact it is just red for no reason, it is actually really safe. I only realized that when I scrolled down to the details and it told me the opposite ;)

Ah, very good point. Never really considered that. We'll definitely discuss how we can make that more clear. Thanks!

How do you get all the data though? No home owner is going to give you this data. And what is you have something wrong on there, and a owner sues you for it, because your lower rating might adversely affecting their sale.

That's a fair question. A lot of the data comes from complaints and reports filed through local government agencies. We try to be very objective with the data and present it to the consumer so they can judge for themselves.

We have also talked about the idea of allowing building owners to comment or make a request to prove that issues in a building have been fixed. Though that would be a little ways down the road.

Good service. I can totally see myself using this one, but I am in Canada. There will be a bit of risk in this service, and that's ok, not everyone will be happy. it is like carfax, or even like yelp for houses. It requires a bit of polish though. I looked at the sample report, and upon clicking a link give some indication that the data is loading. i clicked 3 4 times before knowing the data is loading. Chronological order of reports/issues should be latest first. Right now, I saw 1997 report on top.

Thanks so much for the feedback. The loading is still something we're trying to improve. It's pulling in a large amount of data that takes a bit of time. I think we'll end up doing a nightly roll-up of that data to help improve page load times.

I'll take a look at the chronological sorting issue. From a first glance it is working for me but it could be something else going on. Thanks again for the feedback.

Maybe you could display the data as it is loading? So instead of making the user wait to see all the results you could show the user as the server drip feeds the results to the browser. Just a suggestion.

You produce a lot of data but it is hard to make sense of it all, maybe some kind of comparison tool would be useful?

Also I am very curious how you managed to do the whole nearby celebrity address thing?

This actually has a lot of potential, but I am not sure if you could profit by selling this to real estate agents as something like this kind of makes their job obsolete.

Maybe you could target the renters demographic, people who rent generally switch locations more often (therefore more recurrent to your service) and are not as accommodated by real estate agents and other third parties (probably because they are not spending as much so no fat commissions).

I don't know your business model very well but another idea is maybe leaving the service free and placing advertisements. Your user demographic is looking to buy or rent a property - very valuable to advertisers. So maybe you should cache the pages you generate and add them to an automatically generated sitemap allowing google to index those and hopefully you will start appearing on search results for people looking to buy a property. If you want to be really aggressive you could scrape property listings off real estate websites and pre-generate those to be indexed by google with the intention of appearing on search results.

Sorry, I'm rambling here ;)

See the elevator in frequent need of repair page pop-up. 1997 report is first. I do not know how the data is being sorted, maybe give user the power to sort it?

Also, I just noticed that the data is actualy quite comprehensive. You have a lot of fluff in-between the detailed data. Dashboard, then some picture carousel, and then map. But the cream of the crop data is buried below. That data is really awesome, pest control, neighbourhood crimes. I am not a UI /UX person, but there has to be a better visual representaion for it. I like how you mention milestones and even famous celebrities in the vicinity, but at first it seems a bit confusing at to what purpose those pictures serve until it hits you. I did not even scroll down at first. I just stopped at dashboard, clicked the reports and that's it. Really good idea, polish it really well. I know a bit superficial advice, but you can get this thing going pretty well. Offer a one-time service too for $20 or so.

Cool, I'll check out the sorting issue some more.

That's great feedback as well. We'd debated whether we needed to put a heading above the celebrity carousel and decided to leave it out. I guess we might want to add that in.

Totally agree that the meat of it is down in those datatables. One of our top priorities is to figure out a way to better visualize that. It'll also make the page load much quicker since all that raw data is a lot of HTML to render and send across the wire.

We're still trying to figure out pricing and at this point just want people to use it for free so we can get feedback and iterate and improve before we think about charging. Thanks again for the great feedback.

We just launched our new startup this morning. Huge thanks to the HN community for advice and feedback. It's been a great journey so far. Any new feedback would be greatly appreciated!

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