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

locatable.com

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

#31

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…

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

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

#32
post #31

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…

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

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.

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

#34
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.

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

#35
post #30

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 mor…

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

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!

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

#36

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 ch…

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.

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