
Show HN: I built FabHomePages so your home can have its own homepage in minutes - etewiah
https://fabhomepages.com/
======
onion2k
I like the idea, and executing and launching is _always_ good, but the example
website ([https://luxury-villa.incostadelsol.com/](https://luxury-
villa.incostadelsol.com/)) looks pretty bad as a tool to sell a €1,499,000
home. The images desperately need some attention as they're blurry on high
resolution screens, the design doesn't exactly say "luxury" or "high quality
home", and there's way too much animation going on.

~~~
stevievee
I agree but it's close to looking decent - some basic design changes
(especially typography) will go a long way.

~~~
glxxyz
The typography on the main site is pretty bad too. Very cluttered with huge
text everywhere. Odd changes of fonts in places.

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etewiah
Once again thanks to everyone who's tried it out, really appreciate it!!

Rather than answering every single comment I'm going to reply to the points
raised in one place.

The main feedback seems to be that it's not polished enough. Completely true
and I will work on that for the rest of this week - please have another look
next week and let me know what you think.

There are also a few people who encountered server errors. Yes, I'm afraid I
underestimated the interest. Not a good time right now to upgrade the server
but I will do that before the next bit of promotion.

Regarding the business model, @nogabebop23 points out about working with
estate agents. It really isn't a binary decision to sell your home yourself or
use an agent. This tool complements either approach and crucially you can
start using it before you make a decision on that - I will add more
functionality to make that even more so.

I have quickly written a post to explain a bit more about the project:

[https://medium.com/@weebrix/when-a-hacker-tried-selling-
his-...](https://medium.com/@weebrix/when-a-hacker-tried-selling-his-home-
during-the-corona-lockdown-7b7cb200f7f8?sk=9b6fecba3a89d6c2ef34058ebc357d10)

Ah, and regarding how long trial pages will be kept. For those who create an
account I will not delete them. For those who don't, they will be deleted
after 30 days. Sorry, I will update the terms and conditions to reflect that.

------
pembrook
I think this is a really really great idea.

But the execution shown is a cheesy slideshow with horrible quality images. To
be honest I think it makes the home look worse than it would otherwise.

I think your MVP is too rough to even validate the idea. If people don't start
using it, you won't know if its because it's not something they want, or if
it's because the design is so bad.

I'd look into getting some freelance design help or steal some visual cues
from the more established real estate startups out there that have a lot of
funding (and subsequently, good design teams).

Somebody who would eventually pay for a website for their house is likely to
be in a higher price market segment. So you're going to need to make this feel
"luxury" to get those customers.

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etewiah
I planned to put my home in Birmingham on the market earlier this year.
Terrible timing ;(. Fortunately the lockdown did give me a lot of time to
reflect on the process of selling a home. FabHomePages is the result of that.

I used it myself to share the news of my plans with friends and to get
feedback. Will soon be adding features to help people plan the process of
selling and to connect with service providers.

~~~
nogabebop23
not sure how things work in your jurisdiction, but to sell in our area you
basically need to work with an agent to get into the market of home buyers;
FSBO just doesn't work. The minute I'm on the hook to pay THAT level of
commission, I'm not doing anything in this area; there's so little a real
estate agent can do they're definitely going to be responsible for marketing,
images, staging etc. From my experience selling anything to real estate agents
is a uphill battle. They are understandably extremely cheap. This looks
interesting but I think you need to focus on defining your potential market a
little more.

~~~
glxxyz
Exactly. I bought and sold in July. We were in a rush to sell as we had made a
firm offer and were facing an unknown market with lockdown just beginning to
ease. My realtor staged the condo, built a slick site under their domain with
a 3d (Cardboard-compatible) virtual tour and detailed floorplan, put it out on
social media, bought ads, printed glossy brochures to leave in the front
hallway, and of course put it out on the MLS central listing service. We sold
for more than identical pre-Covid listings, enough above what we'd have taken
to cover both Agents' fees. FSBO would have been a false economy for us.

When I've browsed FSBO property listings they are usually overpriced and/or in
disrepair, where the seller has taken a similar level of care with their
property maintenance as they are taking with the act of listing it.

I think use of Realtors is an example of a Nash equilibrium. Other buyers and
sellers use them, so you have too, even though it would be optimal for buyers
and sellers for none of us to use them. When I look back at the five
properties transactions I've done, it feels like I've paid a lot to Realtors,
but in each transaction using a Realtor was the optimal choice.

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etewiah
Wow, I'm really getting the HN hug of love! Thank you everyone, really
appreciate it.

Please, whatever you do though don't post this to product hunt. I'd really
appreciate the chance to act on the feedback I get here first.

~~~
Fiveplus
Oh yeah I logged in to tell you that. I was having a lot of fun customizing
the details of a page when I met with a 500 error. Love the idea and
execution, the best part would be the presentation mode. Are you planning to
add an optional background music option in the future?

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yourapostasy
I've always wanted a home ERP.

Starting from the digitized survey, to ground-penetrating radar survey
digitized results to show exact septic layout and the bedrock profile along
that layout, to exact DGPS locations of every brush and tree, to precise
topology map, to a precise BOM of the house, vendors, pricing, invoices,
quotations, Bill Of Tools used for installing each piece, dimensions, wire run
lengths, known ratings (like compressive strength of the concrete used),
warranty information, product manuals, CAD drawings in an open source format,
schematics (electrical, plumbing, HVAC), maintenance cycles, tools and
supplies for each maintenance incident, scheduling of maintenance, budgeting
of maintenance, lifecycle budgeting, and so on. I'd like to use some kind of
combined voice input, AR glasses and scanning from my smartphone to automate
the data entry of this kind of information as it passes my hands.

Here's to hoping something like FabHomePages eventually morphs into such an
ERP.

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drenvuk
Looks cool, Zillow is similar but it unfortunately makes you sign up first. I
like this.

On an unrelated note, how did this link get onto the front page with only 3
points? How does the ratings thing work here?

~~~
bottled_poe
I would guess clicks are a factor

~~~
Raed667
How would HN without JS or a URL minifier/redirector know about clicks?

~~~
blisseyGo
Not sure about this particular post but for HN, every action is a HTTP GET
request to HN (except when you click on the post's website link itself). So
the GET request is pretty much the same as the click on HN. This is just my
guess though.

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i_have_to_speak
Oh, it's ((FabHome)Pages), not (Fab(HomePages)). Hmm.

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Minor49er
Reminds me of a feature on Total Expert's CRM for creating site pages. It's
not open access, but there's an overview of it here:
[https://blog.totalexpert.com/5-features-every-single-
propert...](https://blog.totalexpert.com/5-features-every-single-property-
site-needs)

Total Expert's offering is geared more towards real estate agents, but the
interfaces are both pretty similar. The only major difference I see so far is
that FabHomePages doesn't take an address and automatically load it with
listing images (or at least from what I have seen so far), though that would
make sense since FabHomePages seems to be for individual sellers who probably
have their own photos to work with.

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fluidcruft
My workplace IT blocks your example website so I just see a scary box in the
middle of your landing page that says "Did Not Connect: Potential Security
Issue".

[https://imgur.com/UYKuE4y](https://imgur.com/UYKuE4y)

~~~
etewiah
Thanks for reporting this.

I can't quite understand what happened - the error says firefox did not
continue because "this website requires a secure connection". Surely the fact
that it is a secure connection is a good thing and not a reason to not
connect.

I use https for the site and have tested with different browsers including
firefox without successfully reproducing.

~~~
fluidcruft
The example page is being blocked by hospital IT using something called "Cisco
Umbrella" which on ancient internet explorer will redirect to display a
warning saying that it's been blocked by "Cisco Umbrella", but on everything
else the Cisco redirect is detected as MitM and you just get security
warnings.

Honestly, I'm surprised fabhomepages itself wasn't blocked. I just thought it
was odd that one would load and the other wouldn't. So basically what's
happening is:

[https://fabhomepages.com/](https://fabhomepages.com/) : whitelisted

[https://luxury-villa.incostadelsol.com/](https://luxury-
villa.incostadelsol.com/) : blacklisted

------
rubyn00bie
Good luck with this, but I haven’t seen traction with any product like this
because people just don’t care. The real estate market is one of the worst to
operate in as a technology company without an extremely large endowment to
start you out. Homeowners in general don’t care to keep records of their homes
in digital format, nor make information about their home public. They say they
do but when push comes to shove and they have to pay, no one will pay.

I’m not trying to be a downer but I’m still wearing scars from my time doing
real estate tech and can’t recommend it to anyone as a start up or business.
It’s awful and not fixable.

------
jeroenhd
Based on the useless scrollbar next to the presentation and next to the demo
iframe on the website, I'm guessing this was developed and tested on macOS
where scrollbars are invisible. Web designers, please enable scrollbars! Not a
great look for someone trying to sell a type of webhosting in my opinion.

I'm not sure about the demo case to be honest. If you're trying to sell a
villa that's worth a 1.5m euros, you should probably spend some money and
invest in something more professional than the Wix of home sales.

------
gwbas1c
I really don't get it.

(In the US,) When I sold my home, the realtor did all this stuff. It was all
posted on MLS.

Furthermore, why would I do this NOW if I have no intention of moving?

------
Waterluvian
Tangentially related: is there a trick to selling a home when you have
toddlers? How do you stage and keep it staged? Is there a scenario where I can
make a fab home page and other stuff and pass on having an overly staged home?

~~~
bennyp101
We are in the process of doing that, and we've come to the conclusion that we
are selling a family home, so it's pointless trying to create it looking like
a showhouse.

We had a big tidy/clean up, for the virtual tour, and then just have a little
potter around with the hoover and pick things up before anyone wants to have a
look.

When we bought this house, it was nice to be able to see where toys and the
kids stuff would actually fit into the house - and that it wouldn't be super
cluttered (at least to start with!).

~~~
glxxyz
Your home will almost definitely sell for more without all the daily life
clutter and toys. For example- not all buyers have kids, what you see as a
family home may be their new work from home live/office space.

~~~
jonnycomputer
Probably true, but this is just an obstacle most people don't have anyway to
get around. Moving out to a new home or apartment waiting for home to sale can
easily be unaffordable to a lot of Americans.

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gus_massa
For how long are the trial pages keep live? You will get an huge amount of
spam.

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mackle_hair
nice idea - would be good to prompt for my email more. i dont currently want
to sell my home but when i do i'd like to have you in my email history so i
can look you up and remember you.

~~~
mackle_hair
i just tried to sign up and it failed when i put in my email address.

~~~
etewiah
Thanks for the heads up. I can see that a user who's email starts with "mx"
signed up but did not login.

Can you describe the exact error you got? And if you don't mind please send me
an email (my username at hotmail.com) so I can follow up.

Thanks again

