Where to meet a millionaire

What's Australian's most expensive suburb? 
Hint: It's not in Sydney or Melbourne.

RP Data say it's Peppermint Grove, where the median house price of $4.6million is almost a whole million over the next most expensive suburb. 

Here's our own record of prices: (many of those million plus properties have more than four bedrooms obviously...)

And that suburb next in line is Sydney's Vaucluse at $3.78million.

But being a millionaire is apparently not as uncommon and grand as you might have thought, 212 suburbs recorded a median price of $1million or more in December.  In 2005 there were only 78 suburbs in this prestigious millionaires club.

If you're interested in keeping abreast of the market medians, and you like the look of the price average boxes above,  you might like to consider adding one to your own site.  These price boxes are just one of the ways we can share what we know.  And we know how interested us Aussies are in house price trends.

Nestoria Australia for iPad, by Boilingpoint Software

We love it when people use our API and come up with things that we might not have come up with ourselves.  So, it makes for a nice Monday morning to come in and discover that someone's used it to make an iPad app.  It's called Oz House Prices for iPad, and it's by Boilingpoint Software, who have designed it as an easy way to keep track of house prices and other trends in the Australian housing market.

It lets you: view monthly average housing prices suburb by suburb, and compare them against each other or averages across the states.  As well as location, you can also filter properties by the number of bedrooms they have. 

I, sadly, don't have an iPad handy to try this out on, so I have to rely on the preview, but if you do have an iPad and take this app out for a spin please let me know how it goes here.

They do provide you with a number of screen shots though:

If you'd like more inspiration and information on how to use our API to make cool things, check out our App Gallery.

Older is Better

One of the BST Nestoria interns has been beavering away on our API, and it's now been re-released in all its glory.  [Insert trumpet burst here] Welcome Nestoria API 1.18. 

In the UK turning 18 means the same thing that it does in Aus., more complex features – and you start getting asked for ID, but you actually have some.

By Flickr user ev0luti0nary

The two main additions are response fields that return API response status:

•     * "application_status_code"; and
•     * "application_status_text".

If you know what that means then you can find out the details on the Nestoria API  Return Codes page.  You could also set your imagination onto the spin cycle with it ands see what you come up with – we're always very pleased to hear about people using our API to do cooler things than we can think of ourselves. 

If you don't know what it means, but you have a vague idea what an API is then, the improvements mean that the API results have been brought into line with regular Nestoria results.  So if you've been using an app. which was using the Nestoria API to request listings by location, it will now receive notification of misspelled, ambiguous or unknown locations.

If you don't know what this means at all, then in a nutshell it means that we provide a way for other people to use the information in the Nestoria database to make other cool applications and websites.  There are some examples of what people have done with it in the past in our API Gallery.

Big THANK YOU

Today, on behalf of Nestoria Australia, I'd like to say a special thank you to all the people who gave their time to create Open Street Map Australia.  We appreciate this level of commitment to building better maps on a daily basis, but we're saying a special thank you today because today we activated the OSM option on Nestoria.com.au.  So now, as well as checking out where the properties you're searching for are on our standard map, you can also locate it, and it's surrounds, on our custom made Cloudmade OSM maps. (Cloudmade allows you to create your own designs for OSM maps and integrate them on your website via their API.).

Here's what the OSM version looks like:

...love those big orange highways...  Vs. the standard map view:

I've used Brisbane as an example because that's the home town of OSM Australia's David Dean who the Nestoria Australia blog has already befriended.

But to make full use of this function you can either add the word openstreemap to the front of any nestoria.com.au address, eg.:
http://openstreetmap.nestoria.com.au/brisbane/real-estate-property/sale
vs.
http://www.nestoria.com.au/brisbane/real-estate-property/sale

Or you can use the drop down menu:

So - thanks for all the time you took walking/ biking or driving around making geo notes.  A big YAY for community sourced data!

The people have spoken

One of the ways we Nestorians work to improve the way the site works is by conducting 'bucket tests' (or A/B tests) to see if users like their Nestoria tweaked one way or another. 

One of the recent tests involved how people like to control the order their search results appear in.  In order to find out what people like best we presented two different versions of Nestoria in which everything but the sorting panel was identical, then watched what people did.  Turns out people prefer to sort using a drop down menu – and we could see their point: it does look neat and out of the way.  So we went with the people's choice, which is what you can now see on the site.

The standard is order is Nestoria Rank, which is an algorithmic recipe that takes into account the quality of the information provided to us by our portal partners, but you can now use the drop down menu to rearrange the list by:
Price – highest or lowest first
Number of Bedrooms – highest or lowest first
Date – oldest or newest listings first. 

So if you have any ideas about how to improve the site, especially to make it easier to use, then please let us know and we'll bucket test them out and see if the rest of our users like your idea as well. 

It's time...

It's time... For a while this blog was promising things that we just couldn't show you physically because the interesting, working, part of the site wasn't quite ready for use.   So I couldn't share such joys as 'the moment when we worked out how to properly list properties for rent in Sale, Victoria' with you...

But the time of that non-interactive outline drawing of Australia has passed: Nestoria Australia is ready! So don't waste anymore time reading this post and head right over to it to have a look and a play...  But before you do: whenever we launch in a new country there's always some things we don't get right straight away, so please let us know if you see any problems or have any suggestions.

If you're a patient soul and you're reading beyond the photo of us proud Nestorian parents celebrating the launch, (note the upside-down map of Europe behind us suggesting how keen we are to take on an Australian perspective) then I'll reiterate how interested we are in your feedback: Our main aim is always to help people find their next home to rent or buy as quickly and easily as possible, so the plan is that over the upcoming months we learn from how nestoria.com.au is being used and make sure it's finely tuned to the interests and habits of the Australian house hunting market.

One of Nestoria's founders, Ed Freyfogle, will be out in Australia in May if you want a personal introduction to the site, but you're always welcome to chat to us anytime.  You can have a look at Ed's announcement on the UK blog if you're still hungry for more chat about the launch.

Augmented Reality Nestoria

It was only a few short weeks ago that the words Augmented Reality were first typed into this blog, but in the world of technology things can move pretty quickly – assisted by the hard work of the rest of the Nestoria team, and the fact that they'd known about it for quite a while longer – and today it's possible to see, yes see with your own eyes, what it's like to search for Nestoria property listings on your mobile device using AR.

The Nestoria AR app is part of a suite of useful information you can find on the Samsung Layar service which you can see at work here, popping property information up onto your screen in real time.  In the case of this video, made by the fair hands of Nestoria's Nomsa and Matteo just outside the London offices, you're watching it on the Samsung Galaxy, which runs Android OS, which is the Google version of the iPhone OS.

If you want to find out a bit more about how Samsung and Layar are working together there's an interesting interview with Nick Turner-Samuels from Samsung Mobile UK on the UK blog.

 

Introduction to Lokku Labs and Lokku Labs Australia

The Nestoria team has more ideas for ways to match people and real estate than can fit onto one website, so some of them are sent off to be experimented with at the Lokku Labs, which is Nestoria's testing platform.  The projects developed here usually offer a different way to search Nestoria data, or else mix the data with other sources.
As well as the buzz of building tools that make it easier for people to match themselves to their new home, the Lokku Labs are about inspiring developers to play around with the data available on the Nestoria API.  These are some of the ideas that have come out of the Lab so far:

Freedom of Speech the Gartoo way

Just as there's more than one way to de-fur a feline, there's also more than one way to search for property on the internet.  The most common way offered by property websites is the field-restricted search model which involves drop down menus offering specific search ranges – we're talking price/ number of bedrooms etc. - but the kind of free text search you use on Google or Yahoo! can also be harnessed by property hunters on Lokku Labs creation Gartoo.

Gartoo was tested on the UK listings, so searches like 'easy access to Heathrow and Gatwick'  and 'Canary Wharf flats to let with security' were processed like guinea pigs though the system.  The result being, as you can probably imagine, interesting and varied.

The trick is in making a system that actually understands what the query means – you think people have a hard time communicating, but try inputting 'houses to rent in Sale'  into a full text property search and see what listings you're offered!  Since Gartoo's creation in August quite a bit has been done on the algorithm and the relevancy of results it returns is constantly improving.

There's an Australian version on the way so you can test out the 'houses for rent in Sale' VIC query there as well.

Where Can I Live?

They call it the rat race for reasons that every big city commuter is probably well aware of... For a lot of people time actually is money, and if they could buy themselves out of an evil commute they probably would, so the Professors at the Lokku Labs came up with a property search based on public transport links called 'Where Can I Live'.  The kind of search this little site facilitates are queries like:

I want to commute to London Victoria, it shouldn't take longer than 30 minutes station to station and I can afford a 1 bedroom property to rent for less than £325 a week

Or I need to commute to Green Park, it shouldn't take longer than 20 minutes station to station and I can afford a 1 bedroom property to buy for less than £400,000

It's the perfect tool for people who know exactly what they want and don't want to spend too much time looking for it.
There's also international versions for Milan, Rome, Barcelona, Madrid, Munich, Berlin and Frankfurt.

Nestoholic: Making you popular at dinner parties

Housing prices are a conversation staple, served up at about as many dinner parties as wine.  Dry or heated, this conversation is vastly improved served with Nestoholic, a Lokku Labs development that compares average house prices in different parts of the UK – for example between old rivals Oxford vs. Cambridge, or newer rivals Chelsea vs. Arsenal.

To explain Nestoholic's magic a bit more clearly, it uses the Nestoria API, taking the average asking price from the Nestoria database.  Because the Nestoria database is updated daily the statistics are pretty reliable and it's a good way to stay on top of the market as well as being a useful tool to back up your opinion with at parties – no need to keep up with the Joneses when you are the Joneses.