Show HN: Find a home close to work
openlistings.co
Show HN: Find a home close to work
1–10 of 68 posts
Re: Show HN: Find a home close to work
#2Very interesting. The site looks clean and it's fast.
Where do you get your data? I used to work for one of the industry dinosaurs; our only competitive advantage was that we had agreements with most of the 674 MLSes to rehost their data for our clients, which were RE Agent companies. Zillow is still using Trulia as a pipe to funnel that MLS data from my former employer.
Is that one of the reasons for piloting in CA - fewer MLSes to partner with?
Re: Show HN: Find a home close to work
#3What's different now than at your launch (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9113240)?
Re: Show HN: Find a home close to work
#4Hey HN, I'm a founder at Open Listings and did a lot of the engineering of this project. We got a lot of inquiries from tech workers who really cared about their commute times, so we used Googles Distance Matrix API [0] to sort listings by commute time.
I'll be on here with my cofounders today to answer any questions you might have.
[0]: https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/distancemat...
Re: Show HN: Find a home close to work
#5What's different now than at your launch ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9113240 )?
Good question. We've done a bunch of transactions, learned more about our customers and built this purpose specific site for our biggest segment (tech workers looking to live closer to the office).
Re: Show HN: Find a home close to work
#6Very interesting. The site looks clean and it's fast. Where do you get your data? I used to work for one of the industry dinosaurs; our only competitive advantage was that we had agreements with most of the 674 MLSes to rehost their data for our clients, which were RE Agent companies. Zillow is still using Trulia as a pipe to funnel that MLS data from my former employer. Is that one of the reasons for piloting in CA…
As a California RE brokerage we join each MLS and get a direct feed from their RETS api. It's a dramatically better data feed than any of the aggregators offer and we get listings the minute they come on market (well our polling interval is more like 5 minutes). So far we have 100% coverage in San Francisco, Oakland/East Bay, Silicon Valley, and Los Angeles. We've just joined the San Diego MLS and will have data there soon. And yes, our strategy is to go deep on California, prioritizing data quality over sheer number of listings.
Re: Show HN: Find a home close to work
#7The site is very nice, but how does anyone afford houses that expensive in those areas?
I live in Texas and my nice modern 2000 SF house is only $190.
Re: Show HN: Find a home close to work
#8The site is very nice, but how does anyone afford houses that expensive in those areas? I live in Texas and my nice modern 2000 SF house is only $190.
This is for the "IT 1%ers", those Bay Area/SV kids that make middle 6 digits 2 years out of college. The rest of the world has to make do.
Re: Show HN: Find a home close to work
#9The site is very nice, but how does anyone afford houses that expensive in those areas? I live in Texas and my nice modern 2000 SF house is only $190.
It's tough! As a company we're trying to make it cheaper by refunding half of our commission back to the buyer [0]. If you're doing an FHA loan, that can be almost 50% of the down payment. We can also help with the purchase of low income housing if you qualify [1]. We're actually thinking about building some tools to make this inventory more accessible. You might also try checking out our cheekily named list of fixer-uppers, Shitty Listings [2]. As you'll notice, a "fixer-upper" near the California coast can still be pretty pricy but I think there's just a fundamental supply constraint. Incidentally, that's most likely why real estate has been a lasting and valuable asset class.
[0]: https://www.openlistings.co/our-commission-refund [1]: http://sf-moh.org/index.aspx?page=262 [2]: http://www.shittylistings.com/
Re: Show HN: Find a home close to work
#10The site is very nice, but how does anyone afford houses that expensive in those areas? I live in Texas and my nice modern 2000 SF house is only $190.
Right? Even with a massive salary and no kids you'd have a hard time paying the mortgage. It's completely absurd to me.