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Show HN: We made a photo search engine for homes for sale

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21–30 of 62 posts

Re: Show HN: We made a photo search engine for homes for sale

#21

Nice work! Curious about your tech-stack, if you don't mind sharing. Also what are your plans for monetizing, if any?

Nothing more interesting than rails + alloydb (for the vector search) + hotwire.

First time I've built with Hotwire, I'm not a front end eng by trade, but loved the devex.

Re: Show HN: We made a photo search engine for homes for sale

#22

- I liked the 'surprise' button because I wasn't sure what to type in the search box. I'm so used to typing a location by default. - I like your examples in this HN post and also the categories below the fold. - I like that I can favorite things without registering an account. I've been experimenting with guest accounts and blank states on my site. - When I search for multiple words from the search tab, acts funny. "…

We've absolutely got some tuning to do on the autosuggest - suspect what you're seeing is some function of a transatlantic trip.

Re: Show HN: We made a photo search engine for homes for sale

#23

I like the idea! I typed in "futuristic" which got some wild results. The problem is that some properties will have one crazy photo of a single room (sometimes in the lobby of a block of flats) that is nothing like the rest of the property on offer. One property even showed the escalators of a local Underground station as its primary thumbnail, which were kinda futuristic looking.

We run a process on images to try and work out what's what (inside, outside, building, garden etc). Flat with common areas can be quite challenging. Glad you saw a cool escalator, even if we didn't intend to show that to you

Re: Show HN: We made a photo search engine for homes for sale

#24
Can you run all your photos through a focal length/depth of field transform to match the human eye? Real estate agents like to bait and switch and waste people's time with glamorous photos that are made using focals lengths that are very different from actual humans.

Re: Show HN: We made a photo search engine for homes for sale

#25

It is an interesting product but I really do wonder if it is something users are asking for. In the market jitty is going for I would say that discovering what is on any given real estate website is not the big pain point.

I don't know, maybe it depends on what they do with the images. If they just use the images to recreate MLS-style data—the basic stuff like square footage and number of bathrooms—then no, not useful to me. But there are questions that aren't answered by searching MLS data, like: "are there enough electrical outlets in every room", and "does this kitchen have a useful work triangle?". If I could search for that kind of thing, it would be amazing.

Re: Show HN: We made a photo search engine for homes for sale

#26
If you’re scraping the estate agents’ sites rather than striking licensing agreements, I can see how you might justify analysing the images to build a property profile but when you’re reproducing them on your site how do you get round the photographer’s copyright?

Re: Show HN: We made a photo search engine for homes for sale

#28
post #24

Can you run all your photos through a focal length/depth of field transform to match the human eye? Real estate agents like to bait and switch and waste people's time with glamorous photos that are made using focals lengths that are very different from actual humans.

That's interesting, can you explain a bit more. How would you go about transforming the focal length or depth

Re: Show HN: We made a photo search engine for homes for sale

#29

It is an interesting product but I really do wonder if it is something users are asking for. In the market jitty is going for I would say that discovering what is on any given real estate website is not the big pain point.

For sure big real estate portals functionally work. People buy homes through them, even if the experience is clunky. But because they’re entrenched via massive network effects / SEO, and their actual customers are estate agents, there’s basically no incentive to innovate. That's why the top property portals are such great businesses - Rightmove in the UK has like 70% margins.

I think what you're saying is there's that there’s deeper pain further down the value chain? If so, agreed. We think there’s an opportunity to solve some of that, and that building a better product / search experience at the top of the funnel makes it easier to fix problems later in the journey.

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