
Show HN: Find rental flats based on commute time to your workplace (Switzerland) - pierre
http://wonsch.ch/
======
relate
I'm one of the creators. This was built in 40 hours at Hackzurich 2015
(www.hackzurich.com) and combines the following:

    
    
        * The largest rent database of Switzerland 
        * A model of the train system of Switzerland
        * A simple recommender system
        * Google maps for name -> geolocation
        * OpenStreetMap for the map
    

There are some heavy calculations behind each query, so it takes about 15 sec
to load. Furthermore, you need to like at least 3 apartments and dislike at
least 3, before the system starts recommending.

~~~
icot
I'm also curious about the commute time estimation. I've been playing with the
app around the Geneva area where I live and work and I think the commute times
are a bit too optimistic.

Nice idea, in any case!

~~~
relate
Yeah, we are not accounting for connection times right now. However, we have
the data to make it more accurate, just needs a bit more coding ;)

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SlippingAway
We have worked also in a similar application for a few American cities, like
Seattle:
[https://my.teleport.org/cities/c23nb/Seattle/neighborhoods](https://my.teleport.org/cities/c23nb/Seattle/neighborhoods)
(also SF, NY and LA)

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delroth
You might want to switch off DEBUG mode on your backend app...

    
    
        File "/home/django/django_project/wonsch/views.py" in get_data
          35.     homegate_result = requests.get('https://api-**CENSORED**.apicast.io:443/rs/real-estates',headers={'auth':'**CENSORED**'},params=homegate_params).json()

~~~
relate
Thanks :-)

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s3nnyy
A bit off-topic: I lived in Munich for 20 years, now I live in Zurich and
can't be any happier. Switzerland is a great place to work in IT. "HackZurich"
is only one of the things that makes this city into what it is. Check out my
post "Eight reasons why I moved to Switzerland" and shoot me a mail if you are
interested in coming here. [https://medium.com/@iwaninzurich/eight-reasons-
why-i-moved-t...](https://medium.com/@iwaninzurich/eight-reasons-why-i-moved-
to-switzerland-to-work-in-it-c7ac18af4f90)

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ckozlowski
Dear god, please make one of these for Washington, D.C.

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pierre
We might consider it, is there a good Real estate / Rent listing focussed on
DC?

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ckozlowski
Not just for D.C., no. It's one of the larger/more expensive real estate
markets in the U.S., but it's covered by "nationwide" listing tools.

I'm asking for this to be made half in jest, although D.C. traffic is
atrocious, and this sort of data fusion looks fantastic. Your concept looks
great. =)

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gabipurcaru
Cool stuff. There's something similar for London too:
[http://property.mapumental.com/](http://property.mapumental.com/)

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hamhamed
[https://www.stay22.com/](https://www.stay22.com/) Similar too, but for Hotels
and Airbnb in case you are travelling to visit someone else's workplace
(searchable by their company name or address)

~~~
pierre
Seems like a great startup idea :) Hotel website usually have high affiliation
rewards.

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chillydawg
I started a company called locatable (www.locatable.com) with a couple of
mates some years back. The search engine did the same thing in the UK. The
site is now offline, but there's some screenshots here
[https://data.gov.uk/apps/locatable-0](https://data.gov.uk/apps/locatable-0)

By far the most time consuming aspect of running the algorithm was computing
the polygons to plot on the gmap. The actual search is fairly straightforward,
even when using roads instead of the relatively simple public transit graph to
compute the isochrones.

~~~
kawsper
Nice - I wanted something like that the other day. Hopefully with open
government data we would some day be able to solve it.

I want to specify "I want to live close to a forest, a skatepark, and with an
airport 1.5 hours from me", and then it should give me nearby areas that fit
the criteria.

Data-collection, cleaning data, and tagging it up is hard though :(

~~~
chillydawg
Actually, the data cleaning isnt so bad. Open Street Map is what you want. I
wrote a piece of software for locatable that parsed a given chunk of OSM (in
this case, all of the UK mainland) and pull out stuff like hospitals, transit
stations, land usage types and so on. I had two models: a zone and a poi.
Zones were an area, eg a park or a forest or an industrial park that you could
specify as an include/exclude + buffer distance. Eg: At least 10mi from a
forest. Poi is point of interest and had the same search semantics: put me 1mi
from a GP surgery or a supermarket. Or put me at least 1mi from a primary
school because..er...mistakes were made...

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trevyn
I'd rather see recommendations on where to work given where I live.

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arafalov
I'd love to have similar things for super-markets (food/goods shops), for
those without cars and buying lots of stuff. It might be more efficient to get
onto a metro/subway and travel to a distant shop that is very close to the
stop than to walk to a - physically - more proximate shop that requires you to
walk and carry both ways.

~~~
eevilspock
On the other hand, walking for errands is great exercise. I find it strange
that people make such an effort to go to the gym, but also make such an effort
to avoid natural built-into-life exercise. Walking and any kind of motion is
great, especially for those of us in a job that involves so much sitting!

There was a great poster campaign here in New York encouraging people to get
off the subway one stop early, or take the stairs, showing the extra calories
burned.

~~~
arafalov
The issue is not walking, but potentially carrying a lot of groceries or other
things back. A special sub-case, so to speak.

I do love walking in pretty much any other context.

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eevilspock
Trulia does this in the U.S. for a number of cities. Here's New York:
[http://www.trulia.com/local/new-york-
ny/driving:1|transit:0|...](http://www.trulia.com/local/new-york-
ny/driving:1|transit:0|position:40.681953;-73.959595|time:60_commute)

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LiquidFlux
I can't access the OP due to a firewall, is this similar to Zoopla's "time-
travel" search?

[http://www.zoopla.co.uk/travel-time/](http://www.zoopla.co.uk/travel-time/)

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yownie
I used something similar
([http://www.triptropnyc.com/](http://www.triptropnyc.com/)) when I was
choosing where to move to in NYC for the first time.

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flathach
Strange but we made website on same idea at HackZurich :)

~~~
pierre
We made it here too. Do you have a url to share?

~~~
flathach
Sorry we didn't upload it yet and visualized data in a heat map.

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hobo_mark
Can anyone comment how accurate the prices are? Because from what I see rents
around the Geneva area are even more ridicolous than I remembered!

~~~
rasur
Geneva & Zurich are _always_ going to be laughably expensive, mostly.

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ggordan
This is great, I've been considering writing something similar for London
taking account cycling distance/time.

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relate
Ideally I'd also want also to have cycling+train - since that is also a
feasible option for some people. E.g. I live 1km away from a train station
that is well connected to my workplace, so I can bike to the train station and
commute the rest.

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ben_utzer
Where did you get the homegate api? I was looking for it years ago to do
something similar. :/

~~~
yawniek
we opened it specifically for the hack zurich hackathon. but we're working on
providing a public api in the future.

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MadManE
This is pretty amazing. Great job.

