
Show HN: Larry's Cheap Houses – Deep Learning Powered Real Estate Deals - lawrencewu
https://larryscheaphouses.com/
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Arubis
I know "great artists steal" but man is this cutting it close compared to
Scott's Cheap Flights. I mean, you even took the same copy text.

What's funny is I'm not even sure if I mean that accusatorially or admiringly.
Maybe both.

~~~
lawrencewu
Hey Arubis, you're absolutely right. I copied the model from Scott (even the
domain name). I'm unabashedly a huge fan and early subscriber of his
newsletter since mid-2014.

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justboxing
Congrats on shipping! I was looking for something like this.

I did see that you have 1 past deal listed on home page. It would be great if
you can add just a single page titled "Past Deals" or "Highlighted Deals" and
show a few houses that your AI bot identified. That's more likely to encourage
potential subs.

Also, how do you calc the CAP rate etc? Do you crawl existing sites that
already have this data, or do you generate it on the fly? If the latter, how?

And how does your site / email list stack up against the following (which I
think are somewhat related to what you are doing).

1) RoofStock.com - [https://www.roofstock.com](https://www.roofstock.com) \-
Based in Oakland, they do end to end investing online, from intent to closing
on mortgage. Most are already rented too, and they even provide Property
Management services. They have a great engineering team. I even landed a Sr.
Software Engineer position with them last fall, but ended up turning it down.
Highly recommend if you are looking for a tech job... I think they are still
hiring.

2) Mashvisor - [https://www.mashvisor.com](https://www.mashvisor.com) \- Based
in Silicon Valley (I think). They identify and list properties with AirBnB and
Vaca rental potential. I like them too, but their sales team is very pushy and
you can't do anything without signing up for a monthly subscription. I had a
demo with their sales guy last year, and the whole thing was geared towards
getting me to signup and pay.

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faitswulff
Hey Larry, quick recommendation for your photo at the end - you should
probably get a better professional photo that conveys reliability and
confidence in your body language, or at the very least, flip the image so it
draws readers' eyes toward the text.

Ex. [https://imgur.com/a/0tb01](https://imgur.com/a/0tb01)

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abraae
Really? I think the photo's OK.

Tie unloosened, good mix of casual + business like.

Can't detect any obvious lack of confidence.

Making his head point towards the text seems like one of those cheesy
commercials where a smiling person points at the text next to them.

~~~
faitswulff
With regards to the last point, there's actual research to back this up: #3
with the headline "Directional Cues" [https://blog.kissmetrics.com/eye-
tracking-studies/](https://blog.kissmetrics.com/eye-tracking-studies/)

Also, looking down and away from another person is not confidence inspiring. I
don't think I need to cite research in order to point that out.

~~~
abraae
Ha ha, its very hard to argue with that. Very impressive.

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adventured
Tip for @lawrencewu

Real-estate investors are not looking for houses in the US and Canada. They're
looking for investments in Los Angeles, or Kansas, or Salt Lake City, or
Arlington Virginia, et al. If you're sending deals to someone in Arizona, for
New Hampshire or South Carolina properties, they're overwhelmingly going to
fall flat.

Whenever you have the listing breadth to do it, you need to segment the emails
down closer to the end user location, or at least make that an option when
they sign-up. If I'm looking for a real-estate investments as a normal tier
investor (ie I'm not super rich) that might own between one and a few
properties, and I live in Boston, I am not investing in properties in Phoenix
outside of unusual circumstances (eg the great recession, or going in with
someone I just happen to know from there that will handle things locally in
Phoenix).

I'd probably go further and suggest you knock down the pin for a specific
market first, before sending out broad spectrum listings spanning the US in an
email list. Starting out beyond that narrow focus, imo, dramatically increases
the odds of failure, that you never properly connect to your email receivers
(they don't get enough properties for their local interest, and dump your
email list).

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teeray
> "Send me great real estate deals"

Why can't I just browse them? I honestly don't want to deal with your spam in
my inbox every day.

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nsb1
try: greatdeals@mailinator.com

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teeray
I will, but mentioning mailinator usually leads to its domains getting
blacklisted :)

~~~
nsb1
Heh. True. I'm with you though - I want to browse on my schedule, not be
pushed yet more email that I have to sift through.

~~~
justboxing
> not be pushed yet more email that I have to sift through

Makes sense, but I believe it's a lot easier to monetize an email list of
niche subscribers for something like this.[1]

[1] Source : 320K / mo => [https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/scotts-
cheap-flights-...](https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/scotts-cheap-
flights-from-small-side-project-to-booming-business-de62ca54b1)

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aphextron
What exactly constitutes a "cheap house" though? Just because a house is ultra
cheap in absolute sticker price does not make it a good deal, or even "cheap".
It's a combination of neighborhood home values, property taxes, school system,
local economy, demand, geography, appreciation rate, and climate which make a
home a good investment, with the actual home itself mattering least among
those. There's definitely a lot of undervalued real estate in the US, but just
looking for cheap houses is a bad idea.

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jbuild
So it scrapes lots of listing websites and emails when there’s a good deal?
What qualifies as a good deal? How does the were does the deep learning fit
it?

Interesting idea, maybe you could put more info on the linked page.

~~~
whoisjuan
It sounds like a bullshit statement, to be honest. This is probably just a
hand-picked curation of listings that fit the criteria this guy uses to
determine if it's a good investment or not.

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AznHisoka
Often when there is a great deal, it means there is something wrong with the
house or neighborhood.

~~~
rco8786
Worth nothing that neither of those things disqualifies something from being a
great deal.

~~~
ams6110
In fact that often defines a great deal. If a house has a problem and you know
how to deal with it but most buyers won't want to bother, that can make a
really great deal.

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drenvuk
This could be useful. I find it interesting that the two examples of cheap
houses on the front page are in areas that have had severely damaging weather
but I guess you could find cheap houses there. Will I get notifications for
places in Detroit as well?

I think this site will work in many cases except the best. The best cases come
from finding an owner before they list their home, which is pretty rare. When
there's a service that does that I might consider signing up.

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jcsnv
What is the pros/cons between this and something like Realty Shares?

Wouldn't sending an email to a bunch of RE buyers create demand for a cheap
property, which would (in theory) raise the bid, which would cascade to making
the listing "not cheap"? \- Playing devils advocate on this one since I'm sure
not everyone would bid for the same properties.

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matt_heimer
Pressing the button without entering an email results in a popup that says:

Error! Please contact us at founders@larryscheaphouses.com and we'll figure
out what's going on.

Considering the number of people that are going to glance over the text and
assume that the button lets them see the deals you might want to have some
basic help text.

~~~
awad
I'm getting this even while entering an email

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rdmltrs9
Great idea! I’m looking to invest in real estate and have found the hardest
part about it is surfacing interesting deals. If an AI can be parameterized to
search for me, so much the better.

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africajam
For anyone looking to build a product that relies on aggregating real estate
data I've built an open source web scraper specifically for real estate:

[https://github.com/RealEstateWebTools/property_web_scraper](https://github.com/RealEstateWebTools/property_web_scraper)

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arikr
Larry - what did you use for the design of the site? Custom, or which website
builder or template/framework if you used one? Looks great!

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jjazwiecki
This reminds me of a question I've long had – is there no legal restriction on
starting a real estate listing service?

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justboxing
IANAL but it looks like -- and it's hard to tell for sure, as there is no
sample email -- OP's site is "Linking" w/ some additional data, not "Listing".

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tomc1985
Fuck the investor market. Cheap housing should go to people who will actually
live in it, not rent it out or sit on it.

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toomuchtodo
Build said cheap housing. Money has to come from somewhere.

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id_ris
is there anything to verify that this isn't clickbait to get addresses for an
email list

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_coveredInBees
This is such buzzword powered horseshit. Absolutely nothing about this problem
domain requires Deep Learning. Simple regression models if implemented
properly can do just fine. Not to mention that sites like Redfin/Zillow have
access to far more data and already have pretty good models for the most part.
Just because you can throw a Neural net at a given problem, doesn't make it
the right thing to do...

I'd be a lot more forgiving if the site that was linked was an actual blog
post that contained information on how deep learning helped tackle this
problem. But all the site is, is a way to aggregate emails while throwing
buzzwords in your face.

~~~
nedwin
Does it make it the wrong thing to do? I've never seen anyone so mad at
someone for their technical decisions.

Redin/Zillow et al won't show you cap rates.

~~~
_coveredInBees
It's not just technical decisions... the entire site is a single web-page with
zero content except for trying to harvest emails. I mean, if you want people
to spam such low quality stuff on HN, then I guess that's your prerogative.
But I usually enjoy the much higher quality stuff that people post here on HN
and I'd hate for the bar to drop this low.

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AdmiralAsshat
No privacy policy is kind of a red flag. I mean I'm assuming this is a proof
of concept / work in progress, but I _also_ have to assume you're gonna want
to monetize it at some point, so I want to know what you're gonna do with my
e-mail address before I give it to you.

~~~
philtar
I assure you, whatever you think is the worst case scenario has already
happened with your email.

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stcredzero
I'm getting a "Secure Connection Failed."

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mavhc
Buy houses so that people who need to buy houses can't!

