
Show HN: Our new property search website for London - Locatable - vsubramanian
http://www.locatable.com
======
michaelt
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 choose place 1, adjust the time radius slider,
then I choose place 2 I get a new popup and my previous settings change is
discarded. Could the changes auto-save, like when you drag and drop the place
marker?

I'd also suggest, after I've picked a price range, instead of the "Property
listings will appear here - click anywhere in the orange areas to see what's
available in that area." bit why not auto-click somewhere suitable, removing a
step from the UI process?

Also, if I could have a house cost heatmap with and without travelcard costs,
that would be awesome. At the moment it's easy to visualise travel distances,
but a heatmap would let me visualise the travel distance-house cost trade off.

What's your source of train time data? Are transfer times taken into account?

~~~
vsubramanian
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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archangel_one
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 more.

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

~~~
archangel_one
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!

------
macavity23
Very nice idea. To be honest, I doubt you're ever going to get high-quality
timely data on available places, but I think the site is still very useful if
only as a guide to what property is like in the area and which estate agents
to call.

A few issues/suggestions based on 5mins clicking around:

* Lose the 'label' field on each area the user picks - they're already choosing a search term for google maps, why can't you just use that?

* Having chosen two places and chosen some property parameters, the right-hand-side of the page contains two 'property' buttons: one grey, which does nothing, and one orange, which allows me to reset the parameters. The grey one is useless and confusing, lose it

* Having chosen these places and parameters (I chose 'crouch end' and 'dulwich'), I can't see any properties, just the standard gmaps lollipop icons on the map. I guess this is a bug? In any event it's unclear what I should do next - you'd lose me at this point

* There's a big transparent grey footer that doesn't contain anything - what's the purpose of that when you could just show more map?

HTH etc. Nice idea, will check back once in a while...

~~~
vsubramanian
Thanks for the feedback!

>>Having chosen these places and parameters (I chose 'crouch end' and
'dulwich'), I can't see any properties, just the standard gmaps lollipop icons
on the map. I guess this is a bug? In any event it's unclear what I should do
next - you'd lose me at this point * There's a big transparent grey footer
that doesn't contain anything - what's the purpose of that when you could just
show more map?

Sorry about that - this sounds like a genuine bug. The grey footer is meant to
display some text that tells you what to do next (property listings will
appear in that area once you click on one of the orange areas of the map). If
you could ping me to let me know what browser/version etc. that would be much
appreciated!

Apart from that, everything else comes under "search controls usability" which
is one of our top priorities for improvement, we'll definitely be doing some
more work on those.

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dazbradbury
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 honest, and keep it current. After all, they want
tenant leads of any sort.

And that's just the search side. When you start looking into how else you can
save money and improve the system for tenants and landlords you'll realise
you're only scratching the surface.

Hence, whilst it's an awesome tool, I think the whole sector needs to be
improved first. Maybe you can limit your search to OpenRent listings, and then
you'll be keeping tenants happy! ;-)

But seriously, good luck with it - and if you wanted to chat, you can catch me
anytime via the email in my profile.

[1] - <http://www.openrent.co.uk>

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

~~~
dazbradbury
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.

------
vsubramanian
We've spent the last few weeks building Locatable, a property search website
for London. We've integrated lots of transport data (tube/rail/road) to help
you figure out where to live. Road travel times are a bit off at the moment,
but we're working on it. Just looking to get feedback from other HNers, let us
know what you think!

~~~
buro9
I really like this.

Do you think it would be possible to add cycling as a variable?

As in... based on average commuter cycling speed of 14mph including lights,
etc.

If so, then great I'll go and tell a load of cyclists about it.

I guess the next problem for you though is the chicken and egg of getting data
in there.

~~~
vsubramanian
Thanks! Cycling is one of the data points we are planning to add v soon,
pretty much as you described (using average speed profile to calculate the
travel times).

We're also planning on integrating a lot more data - there's a whole load of
open government stuff (think crime stats, schools data) in particular that
we're looking at.

~~~
buro9
Cycling is an interesting one as most avid cyclists want to live somewhere
around a 30 to 45 minute cycle ride away from wherever they work. They
appreciate that it's easiest to get fit and stay fit when a commute is built-
in to the daily cycle of things.

So they are enthusiastic about that not being a convenient place by public
transport or car. Basically they can get really good value accommodation as
not being near a train station has no impact on their ability to access an
area.

Most cyclists I know (a lot of them) have congregated in the South East of
London purely because of these factors.

------
Spearchucker
Very cool!

One issue - when I enter a place and then a property, I click search and all
is good. I then click Property again, which pops up, but the search results
cover the "cancel/search" buttons on the Property page. Means I have to reload
the site and start over. A button to close the search results, or closing them
automatically on smaller screens could be a good thing (I'm on a 1366 x 768
resolution tablet). Unless such a function is there and it doesn't work on
IE10.

Some functional enhancements would be great -

\- In the Property search box it'd be awesome if I could filter by type
(house/flat/etc).

\- It'd also be nice to see a price heat map of not just the area covered by a
place, but of a wider area around that place. A bigger house for the same
money is an incentive for a longer commute.

Otherwise, awesome!

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Pezmc
Hitting errors. The page loads fine directly!

XMLHttpRequest cannot load
[http://api.locatable.com/search?filter=place_filter,20,51.51...](http://api.locatable.com/search?filter=place_filter,20,51.513806,-0.098412,tube).
Origin <http://www.locatable.com> is not allowed by Access-Control-Allow-
Origin.

XMLHttpRequest cannot load <http://api.locatable.com/feedback>. Origin
<http://www.locatable.com> is not allowed by Access-Control-Allow-Origin.

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SideburnsOfDoom
Your numbers are way out.

It says that Highgate is 10 minutes away by road from Old Street. The 271 bus
takes more like 40 minutes on a good morning. I don't think it could be done
in 10 minutes even without traffic.

The AA route planner gives it as 20 minutes which is optimistic
[http://www.theaa.com/route-
planner/index.jsp#fromNode=182600...](http://www.theaa.com/route-
planner/index.jsp#fromNode=18260052008760%7CHighgate,%20London%7CSTREET%7C527853%7C186835%7CtoNode=18260063160635%7COld%20Street%20Underground%20Station,%20London%7CSTREET%7C532754%7C182528)

Enfield is 20 minutes from Old Street by road? I don't think so!

~~~
elemeno
It told me that the City and some parts of London south of the river were 20
minutes away from Highgate. While I have managed to drive from Highgate to
Moorgate in seven minutes, it relied on every traffic light along the way
being green, it being 7am on a public holiday and a loose regard to the posted
speed limit. Any other time forty minutes would be more accurate.

Were you to take the existing road times and triple them, you'd like get a
more realistic circle IMO.

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hnriot
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.

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tezza
Nice! My wife and I have been looking in North London lately.

A huge problem is that properties that have sold are still listed a long time
afterwards.

We've had to stop using online search helpers because of all of the false
positives.

Will your site help with this?

~~~
dazbradbury
We're solving this problem at OpenRent [1], for rentals at least. All of our
properties, if stated as live, are available to rent now. We can do this
because we talk directly to landlords.

[1] Take a look: <http://www.openrent.co.uk>

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encoderer
Reminds me of the YC-funded Movity which was acquired a couple years ago by
Trulia. Good work, guys!

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mietek
Looks great! I'd love to use it the next time I'm looking for a flat.

Unfortunately, by using Zoopla's listings, you still have the most annoying
problem of showing flatshares and studios when looking for 1-bedroom flats.

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cjrp
Really great - the only thing I'd change is the ability to add a price filter
for renting in £ / calendar month (rather than just / week as it is).

Other than that, brilliant!

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c16
I really like this project, I'll be going into uni next year and I know this
will become useful later down the line.

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macleodan
See also <http://www.where-can-i-live.com>

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Gilly_LDN
Is this a spare time project or are you all involved in it full time?

~~~
vsubramanian
The three of us have been working on it full time since September, having done
some spare-time prototyping in the preceding months. We're now trying to
secure some angel investment to help us continue building and growing, it's
something we're all passionate about!

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rayhano
Congratulations. As others have said below, this is pretty, but not solving a
problem people have. The data sucks; solve the sucky data problem and you'll
have something incredible.

Good luck.

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duiker101
it's nice but the help popup is extreamly annoying.

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thlt
you could be interested in cravify.com too :)

