Is there a numerical analysis or just looking at the listing agent description? What I look for as a real estate investor is price disparity: a house with a much lower price than others around it. They say you make money when you buy a house, so buying a low-priced house and bringing up to the standards of the neighborhood has been my formula.
The regex above is one signal we're using. We also look at relative price per sqft and a number of other factors. We could do a little blogpost that goes in-depth on our algorithm if there's interest. We've also tried some fun stuff like running TFIDF on the descriptions [1].
This could be a valuable tool. I like the clean website too. I don't see an About page. It would be interesting to see who is doing this and what you plan to do with it.
We're trying to help people find properties they'd like to buy. We'd be happy to help with the offer and transaction for any home in California, but we're also happy just to provide free tools for home buyers.
could you describe the way you are running TF-IDF on the listings - are you pushing them into Solr/Elasticsearch and then firing a query with the same description to see which scores rank ? Would love to see your query.
Listings in the Bay Area are absurd. I can buy 6 (larger, better maintained) houses almost anywhere else in the country for the price as one house that would be a "starter home" in those same places. The opportunities and culture in the Bay Area are better, but not 6x better than many of these other places.
I guess. I just can't fathom how anybody could have any information at all about property values anywhere else and still look at the housing prices out here and think, "Gee, it's a great idea to buy!" For most (the overwhelming majority of) people it's much cheaper to rent than service a mortgage here, and while there are positives to ownership (e.g. control of the property), it strikes me as less than financially rational to believe they outweigh all the many negatives (opportunity cost, cost of ownership, etc.).
The only good reason to buy in the Bay Area is to be able to control the property. Buying homes as an investment is risky anywhere, but it's especially stupid around here for most people, simply because the expected ROI is so much worse for a given sum of money than can be had in almost any other investment. Only the super (top of the top 1%) have any business putting "home ownership" and "investment" in the same thought for this area.
It is not a bad idea to buy there just as it is not a bad idea to buy in London as opposed to cheaper areas. The prices are not only higher, but the rate at what they were getting higher was also faster than other areas.
In other words, your investment grows faster. If you can afford to buy and plan to sell in 2-3 years you can probably make much more money in the Bay Area than in somewhere else.
Great to see more action in the real estate space. One thing I found interesting was that you actually registered to become brokers to distribute the data and get the commission.
I'm not surprised to see so much push-back from agents [0]. It's a pretty competitive industry and most agents don't take it lightly when their leads are taken :). I do feel like more technology is being adopted but I am curious as to why real estate tech seems so behind?
I also work with real estate data on SimplyRETS (https://simplyrets.com). We aggregate data from MLS's across the US and the state of the art is quite a mess. We took a slightly different approach, though, in that we distribute the data to app developers and brokers through our API and let them manage their leads.
> I do feel like more technology is being adopted but I am curious as to why real estate tech seems so behind?
I think it's 2 things:
1) A lot of technologists find real estate abhorrent. They know it should be fixed but they don't want to be the ones to do it. That's fair. My thought is that the fundamental problem of exchanging money for land is pretty cool, even though all of the connotations of "real estate" kind of suck. So I try to think about it from first principles... what's the ideal way to exchange money for land?
2) It's complicated to get the data due to MLS regulations. Companies like yours help with this, but I believe app developers still have to apply to each MLS to legally get data from a vendor like yourself. It's not like building an app on the Twitter or Tumblr API, you have to call the MLS office and talk to real people (who are usually experts in real estate, not tech) and often pay them real money. Also, I'm guessing your IDX feeds don't always include sold properties or historical data.
> Companies like yours help with this, but I believe app developers still have to apply to each MLS to legally get data from a vendor like yourself.
Not necessarily, in some MLS areas we are able to distribute on behalf of the MLS vendor. It's on a case by case basis and still requires us to ensure we are working with a valid broker, though.
> It's not like building an app on the Twitter or Tumblr API, you have to call the MLS office and talk to real people (who are usually experts in real estate, not tech) and often pay them real money.
In general, this is true. However, we are simplifying the process :). Usually, we are able to handle all the dirty work with the MLS vendor on behalf of the broker. Especially in areas where we have a licensing agreement with that MLS already. Not all MLS's support this but we are growing our reach to handle this as smoothly as possible.
> Also, I'm guessing your IDX feeds don't always include sold properties or historical data.
We can only support what the MLS vendor supports but gaining access to sold and historical has only a problem in smaller MLS areas. It usually costs more at the MLS level, though.
I would be really interested in seeing this data for neighborhoods. Which neighborhoods are undervalued for the area, or which are trending upward in terms of income.
I tried to do this a bit when I was house shopping, find a bargain in a mediocre neighborhood that is improving in terms of crime and income. I didn't find any great data sources besides the Cenus, and that was only really useful going back two surveys.
This is really neat. Now, is there a similar service for purchasing car? for example it would be great if there is a service that looks into craigslist or other sources and sees if there are cars available for sale that is less than a year old, and is a total bargain. not that people invest in cars like they do with real estate, but it would be useful for buyers that look for a deal with cars.
This would be an interesting application for Las Vegas, and clearly the core of any 'flip this house' get rich scheme. But as a way of finding and developing underperforming real estate it looks like a good start.
Adding value here will be finding ever more unstructured/invisible feeds (like the records from the county clerk's office recording title changes).
If you email shitty@openlistings.co with your city I'll let you know when we come to your area (that goes for everyone). We're going for full California coverage in the next month or so.
I always wonder if the developer should care? The only front-ends I write these days are admin backends for my own company, so I very specifically don't care.
That said, is there any data on browser share with JS turned off? Because I'm sure I'm being obtuse, and I know I can be accused of being a dick, but I doubt I would care very much.
My company makes mobile games. We don't support below Android 4, we don't support below iOS 6. Not allowing JS completely is absurd, IMHO, and much like expecting developers to continue to support IE 6. It's 2015, JS is the programming language of the browser-based Internet, and expecting developers to cripple their own applications to support a vanishingly small amount of people that block JS may simply make no sense, economically speaking.
Accessibility. Screen readers allegedly support JS - I don't use one - but I think we can agree it's a harder problem to solve than HMTL.
Not to get too much on my high horse, since you're clearly in an area where there's no way you could ever support vision impairment, the problem with ignoring vanishingly small portions of an audience is that the same people tend to be in that portion all the time and never get anything. For apps that aren't expecting interactions more than every ten seconds, it's so easy to just give them flat HTML.
Nowadays screen readers are fine with the full-blown web, JS and all. The bigger practical issue is simpler things, like not putting alt tags on pictures, or abusing pictures (I saw a stupid website which put alt tags on spacer gifs).
There it is. Thanks. I agree, accessibility should be considered. It's actually extremely difficult in mobile games as engines like Unity have almost no accessibility support whereas UIKit does a really fantastic job.
In any case, I'm definitely for making a site mostly accessible (I've encountered edge cases where it is weird) and if current screen readers support most JS, then I'd test for accessibility, not necessarily all-stop lack of JS.
Ah, sorry about that. I agree there should at least be an error message.
We originally built this as a page on openlistings.co (/fixers), but then found this awesome domain. The assets are all the same from openlistings.co, we're just checking the current domain in our Backbone.js router. Kind of hacky, but it was the quickest way to get it up! Also, if you click any of the detail pages you need the rest of the assets anyway because it takes you back to openlistings.co. Long story short, it's pulling in assets and doing API calls to openlistings.co.
Considering that hosting javascript (and fonts and files) externally leaks information about your visitors to third partys hopefully some developers will care about their users' privacy and not do that.
It used to be that "doesn't work with javascript" also implied "breaks the back button, sucks for SEO, isn't accessible and I can't email urls to people"
It was a convenient short-hand for many things but it's not very reliable in that regard any more.
This site seems fairly solid at first glance so personally speaking I'm not the slightest bit bothered that it doesn't work with javascript disabled.
