Show HN: Shitty Listings algorithmically finds undervalued property
shittylistings.com
shittylistings.com
val = str.match(/probate|trust.sale|short.sale|auction|cash.offers|all.cash|(sold|sale|sell|offered|purchase|comes)[^.]+as.is|as.is[^.]+(condition|sale|contract|clause)|tear.down|damage|rehab|tlc|flip|fixer|needs[^.]+work|bring[^.]+(contractor|architect|builder|decorat|designer|developer|ideas|paint|brush|investor|hammer|handy|imagination|vision|tool|plans)/i)
nval = str.match(/(beautiful|ly|ng|has been|was|just|being|100%|just been) (rehab|remodell?ed)|^Rehabbed|rehabbed [^.]* ?(home|cottage|house|property|unit|apartment|condo)|rehab center|rehab [^.]* ?complete|flip [^.]*switch|not an? ['"\w,]*\s*(flip|fix|probate|reo|repo|short sale|foreclosure)|flip on |flipped|not looking for a \w* flip|flip ?flops|tooth ?brush|Rehabilitation of Historic Buildings/i)We're trying to help people find properties they'd like to buy. We'd be happy to help with the offer and transaction for any home in California, but we're also happy just to provide free tools for home buyers.
And here's the full firehose of shitty listings: https://twitter.com/shittylistings
That said, by "shitty" I don't mean bad or cheap, just that the value would be boosted a lot if it was fixed up.
The only good reason to buy in the Bay Area is to be able to control the property. Buying homes as an investment is risky anywhere, but it's especially stupid around here for most people, simply because the expected ROI is so much worse for a given sum of money than can be had in almost any other investment. Only the super (top of the top 1%) have any business putting "home ownership" and "investment" in the same thought for this area.
In other words, your investment grows faster. If you can afford to buy and plan to sell in 2-3 years you can probably make much more money in the Bay Area than in somewhere else.
I'm not surprised to see so much push-back from agents [0]. It's a pretty competitive industry and most agents don't take it lightly when their leads are taken :). I do feel like more technology is being adopted but I am curious as to why real estate tech seems so behind?
I also work with real estate data on SimplyRETS (https://simplyrets.com). We aggregate data from MLS's across the US and the state of the art is quite a mess. We took a slightly different approach, though, in that we distribute the data to app developers and brokers through our API and let them manage their leads.
Very cool stuff. Keep up the good work!
[0] - See comments in http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/26/openlistings/ and http://www.inman.com/2015/02/27/startup-lets-you-shop-withou....
I think it's 2 things:
1) A lot of technologists find real estate abhorrent. They know it should be fixed but they don't want to be the ones to do it. That's fair. My thought is that the fundamental problem of exchanging money for land is pretty cool, even though all of the connotations of "real estate" kind of suck. So I try to think about it from first principles... what's the ideal way to exchange money for land?
2) It's complicated to get the data due to MLS regulations. Companies like yours help with this, but I believe app developers still have to apply to each MLS to legally get data from a vendor like yourself. It's not like building an app on the Twitter or Tumblr API, you have to call the MLS office and talk to real people (who are usually experts in real estate, not tech) and often pay them real money. Also, I'm guessing your IDX feeds don't always include sold properties or historical data.
Not necessarily, in some MLS areas we are able to distribute on behalf of the MLS vendor. It's on a case by case basis and still requires us to ensure we are working with a valid broker, though.
> It's not like building an app on the Twitter or Tumblr API, you have to call the MLS office and talk to real people (who are usually experts in real estate, not tech) and often pay them real money.
In general, this is true. However, we are simplifying the process :). Usually, we are able to handle all the dirty work with the MLS vendor on behalf of the broker. Especially in areas where we have a licensing agreement with that MLS already. Not all MLS's support this but we are growing our reach to handle this as smoothly as possible.
> Also, I'm guessing your IDX feeds don't always include sold properties or historical data.
We can only support what the MLS vendor supports but gaining access to sold and historical has only a problem in smaller MLS areas. It usually costs more at the MLS level, though.
I tried to do this a bit when I was house shopping, find a bargain in a mediocre neighborhood that is improving in terms of crime and income. I didn't find any great data sources besides the Cenus, and that was only really useful going back two surveys.
Adding value here will be finding ever more unstructured/invisible feeds (like the records from the county clerk's office recording title changes).
That said, is there any data on browser share with JS turned off? Because I'm sure I'm being obtuse, and I know I can be accused of being a dick, but I doubt I would care very much.
My company makes mobile games. We don't support below Android 4, we don't support below iOS 6. Not allowing JS completely is absurd, IMHO, and much like expecting developers to continue to support IE 6. It's 2015, JS is the programming language of the browser-based Internet, and expecting developers to cripple their own applications to support a vanishingly small amount of people that block JS may simply make no sense, economically speaking.
Not to get too much on my high horse, since you're clearly in an area where there's no way you could ever support vision impairment, the problem with ignoring vanishingly small portions of an audience is that the same people tend to be in that portion all the time and never get anything. For apps that aren't expecting interactions more than every ten seconds, it's so easy to just give them flat HTML.
In any case, I'm definitely for making a site mostly accessible (I've encountered edge cases where it is weird) and if current screen readers support most JS, then I'd test for accessibility, not necessarily all-stop lack of JS.
I expect sites sometimes not to work fully. But completely blank?
I expect some sites not to work fully, but completely blank is unexpected.
We originally built this as a page on openlistings.co (/fixers), but then found this awesome domain. The assets are all the same from openlistings.co, we're just checking the current domain in our Backbone.js router. Kind of hacky, but it was the quickest way to get it up! Also, if you click any of the detail pages you need the rest of the assets anyway because it takes you back to openlistings.co. Long story short, it's pulling in assets and doing API calls to openlistings.co.
Like I said, I expect some things not to work. But the page should not be completely blank.
The plain text on the home page does not need javascript for anything.
It is a webapp, those require javascript. The fact that you do not like it is not really relevant.
Ludits cannot be allowed to stop progress.
It was a convenient short-hand for many things but it's not very reliable in that regard any more.
This site seems fairly solid at first glance so personally speaking I'm not the slightest bit bothered that it doesn't work with javascript disabled.