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

#1

Post by travisleestreet » Mon, Mar 17, 2025, 9:25 PM UTC

We're a small team of 3 engineers, and wanted to make a better way to look for for properties online. Traditional portals (esp. outside of US) are just a bit rubbish for doing anything other than basic searching.

So we've:

- Created a crawler that reads through estate agents websites to find homes for sale

- Parses that through a series of LLMs and other models to understand each home in depth (e.g. floor type, location, total sqft)

- Parses every photo through an embeddings vector space so that people can search for whatever they want.

Check it out: https://jitty.com

Currently only for home sales (not rentals), and only in the UK.

Some examples:

- "Beautiful church conversions up to £1m" https://jitty.com/for-sale/price-up-to-1000000-gbp/detached-...

- "Floor to ceiling libraries with a ladder" https://jitty.com/for-sale/look-for-floor_to_ceiling_librari...

- "Home in london, under £1m, with big beautiful windows" https://jitty.com/for-sale/london/price-up-to-1000000-gbp/de...

- "Bathtubs with an epic view" https://jitty.com/for-sale/look-for-bathtubs_with_an_epic_vi...

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

#2

Post by equilibrium » Thu, Mar 20, 2025, 3:46 PM UTC

Nice work! Curious about your tech-stack, if you don't mind sharing.

Also what are your plans for monetizing, if any?

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

#3

Post by gardaani » Thu, Mar 20, 2025, 4:03 PM UTC

Does your crawler respect robots.txt? Does it request pages with nice delays so that it doesn't bring down servers? Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43422413

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

#4

Post by jollyjerry » Thu, Mar 20, 2025, 4:05 PM UTC

- 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. "big windows" became "big". I tried a refresh and the autocomplete said "big windows", but submitting with enter filtered it to "Bath, UK". Maybe there's some timing issue here with fast submits? - I prefer the screenshots / pitch you have on the app store over the website. I like the idea of browsing and filtering, rather than starting with a specific search. Again, that first point that this is something different than location search and helping me understand what I'm supposed to do.

Beautiful site, well done! I love the idea. I'm based in the US.

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

#5

Post by 101008 » Thu, Mar 20, 2025, 4:22 PM UTC

Not from the UK so sorry if this is off-topic, but what are those "dettached" hosues for around 60k? Do they have their own "land"? or you are buying that space "inside" another house? (so in the end you are at the actual owner's mercy?)

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

#6

Post by kureikain » Thu, Mar 20, 2025, 4:25 PM UTC

We did this in 2013, got serve with a lot of lawsuit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeighborCity

Be careful with the real estate industry

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

#7

Post by neuralkoi » Thu, Mar 20, 2025, 4:29 PM UTC

kureikain wrote: post #6

We did this in 2013, got serve with a lot of lawsuit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeighborCity Be careful with the real estate industry

I'm curious, how do businesses like Zillow get around this? Do they have direct agreements with MLS?

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

#8

Post by qingcharles » Thu, Mar 20, 2025, 4:54 PM UTC

101008 wrote: post #5

Not from the UK so sorry if this is off-topic, but what are those "dettached" hosues for around 60k? Do they have their own "land"? or you are buying that space "inside" another house? (so in the end you are at the actual owner's mercy?)

Most houses in the UK are "attached" to another property, either row houses or two houses in one. Detached is just what you would call a regular house in the USA -- it's not touching another building and sits on its own land.

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

#9

Post by qingcharles » Thu, Mar 20, 2025, 4:56 PM UTC

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.

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

#10

Post by smt88 » Thu, Mar 20, 2025, 5:05 PM UTC

neuralkoi wrote: post #7

kureikain wrote: post #6

We did this in 2013, got serve with a lot of lawsuit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeighborCity Be careful with the real estate industry

I'm curious, how do businesses like Zillow get around this? Do they have direct agreements with MLS?

Zillow has spent years building relationships with thousands of litigious MLS's. It's impossible to build a lawsuit-proof real-estate app in the US without doing that.