Show HN: Our new property search website for London - Locatable

http://www.locatable.com

by vsubramanian • 14 years ago

35 35 14 years ago

We've spent the last few weeks building Locatable, a property search website for London. We've integrated lots of transport data (tube/rail/road) to help you figure out where to live. Road travel times are a bit off at the moment, but we're working on it. Just looking to get feedback from other HNers, let us know what you think!

buro92• 14 years ago

I really like this.

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.

vsubramanian7• 14 years ago

Thanks! Cycling is one of the data points we are planning to add v soon, pretty much as you described (using average speed profile to calculate the travel times).

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.

duiker101• 14 years ago

it's nice but the help popup is extreamly annoying.

c16• 14 years ago

I really like this project, I'll be going into uni next year and I know this will become useful later down the line.

tezza• 14 years ago

Nice! My wife and I have been looking in North London lately.

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?

vsubramanian7• 14 years ago

We've been hearing this a lot from speaking to people. Right now, it's a bit difficult as we're just using Zoopla's API (http://developer.zoopla.com/) for the listings. To try and minimise the problem, by default we're showing property listings by Most Recently Published.

OhArgh• 14 years ago

Yea I've had the same problem looking in North London. Just ended going to every estate agent we could find. Some of the are pretty terrible though

dazbradbury3• 14 years ago

We're solving this problem at OpenRent [1], for rentals at least. All of our properties, if stated as live, are available to rent now. We can do this because we talk directly to landlords.

[1] Take a look: http://www.openrent.co.uk

SideburnsOfDoom• 14 years ago

Your numbers are way out.

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!

vsubramanian7• 14 years ago

Yeah, the speed profiles we're using for the road travel have some inaccuracies as they don't yet account for traffic etc. We'll be putting in a separate mode for buses that will be based off more accurate TfL data, so hopefully won't see as bad a wormhole as that once that's in place!

elemeno• 14 years ago

It told me that the City and some parts of London south of the river were 20 minutes away from Highgate. While I have managed to drive from Highgate to Moorgate in seven minutes, it relied on every traffic light along the way being green, it being 7am on a public holiday and a loose regard to the posted speed limit. Any other time forty minutes would be more accurate.

Were you to take the existing road times and triple them, you'd like get a more realistic circle IMO.

cjrp• 14 years ago

Really great - the only thing I'd change is the ability to add a price filter for renting in £ / calendar month (rather than just / week as it is).

Other than that, brilliant!

macavity23• 14 years ago

Very nice idea. To be honest, I doubt you're ever going to get high-quality timely data on available places, but I think the site is still very useful if only as a guide to what property is like in the area and which estate agents to call.

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...

vsubramanian7• 14 years ago

Thanks for the feedback!

>>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.

Gilly_LDN• 14 years ago

Is this a spare time project or are you all involved in it full time?

vsubramanian7• 14 years ago

The three of us have been working on it full time since September, having done some spare-time prototyping in the preceding months. We're now trying to secure some angel investment to help us continue building and growing, it's something we're all passionate about!

Pezmc• 14 years ago

Hitting errors. The page loads fine directly!

XMLHttpRequest cannot load http://api.locatable.com/search?filter=place_filter,20,51.51.... Origin http://www.locatable.com is not allowed by Access-Control-Allow-Origin.

XMLHttpRequest cannot load http://api.locatable.com/feedback. Origin http://www.locatable.com is not allowed by Access-Control-Allow-Origin.

mietek• 14 years ago

Looks great! I'd love to use it the next time I'm looking for a flat.

Unfortunately, by using Zoopla's listings, you still have the most annoying problem of showing flatshares and studios when looking for 1-bedroom flats.

thlt• 14 years ago

you could be interested in cravify.com too :)

michaelt• 14 years ago

Looks good!

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?

vsubramanian7• 14 years ago

Thanks for the feedback! How the filters are set up right now is that the grey ones in the top right are the available ones for you choose from, and the orange ones below are the actual ones you've added and are active.

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.

Spearchucker• 14 years ago

Very cool!

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!

encoderer• 14 years ago

Reminds me of the YC-funded Movity which was acquired a couple years ago by Trulia. Good work, guys!

macleodan• 14 years ago

archangel_one2• 14 years ago

That's quite neat - would be useful to those of us looking for property in London.

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.

rayhano3• 14 years ago

What do you think of this as a solution to properties that don't exist? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0no7GcERjY

archangel_one2• 14 years ago

Well, first, I applaud any efforts to improve/disrupt/whatever the rental market in this town, which is just comically awful. This sounds like it'd be exactly the kind of thing I wanted the last time I was looking, but ended up having to give up on at the time.

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!

dazbradbury3• 14 years ago

Hey guys, OpenRent [1] founder here.

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.

[1] http://www.openrent.co.uk

rayhano3• 14 years ago

Are you guys going to market to agents? Or is OpenRent another tech agent trying to undercut others?

dazbradbury3• 14 years ago

Currently - we don't offer anything to letting agents who are simply performing a tenant find service to landlords. Why? Because they charge tenants admin fees for services we provide for free.

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.

rayhano3• 14 years ago

Congratulations. As others have said below, this is pretty, but not solving a problem people have. The data sucks; solve the sucky data problem and you'll have something incredible.

Good luck.

hnriot• 14 years ago

This might be useless feedback, but those big orange buttons to me looked click-able, but they are not. I clicked 'search' (2) to try it out - the "get started" button was below the fold on my screen (22" widescreen)

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.

Show HN: Our new property search website for London - Locatable

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