What is Nestoria Rank?

To the people who use Nestoria to find their dream property Nestoria Rank is the behind the scenes magic that decides which properties are the best results for their search query

To our partners it's the same thing.  But we try to be a bit more revealing about how it works so that they understand that presenting users with the right property first time benefits them as well as the house hunters, even if it means that their listings don't appear at the top of every query.  To our partners we refer to Nestoria Rank as an algorithm rather than magic.  An algorithm using a few key scales, or metrics, that help decide the results returned for each query: relevancy, freshness, usability or quality and comprehensiveness.

Lots of people like to talk about comprehensiveness because the numbers are big, and lots of choice is good right?  True, but as far as we're concerned giving people hundreds of properties to choose from isn't necessarily Nestoria at it most useful.  That irritating thing about less being more holds true if less equals more perfectly matched results. Which is what vertical search is about.

Relevancy relies in part on the level of search detail house hunters can provide us with.  Which is helped along by us adding new ways for property hunters to refine their search.  Things like allowing people to refine their search by insisting on a balcony or garage.

As well as by the number of bedrooms, and/ or bathrooms, and by location and price. 

Which means searches like this one for a rental property in Mt. Lawley, Perth, with three or more bedrooms, two or more bathrooms, a balcony and a garage, priced from $700 are possible.  We have four properties currently matching this description.

Freshness isn't about the age of a property – though that's another thing you can filter your search for, but we call it 'new builds' – it's about the age of the listing.  How long a property has been on the market is relevant information for house hunters, so we allow them to refine their search by the freshness of the listing. 

Usability and quality refer to the information that Nestoria is given by the real estate agents via our portal partners.  A lot of testing has gone on since Nestoria UK was launched in 2006, and from those tests we've learned that house hunters appreciate information – be that in the form of photos of the property, specific prices and descriptions that provide them with any details we don't have a search refining tool for.  We've done our best to help out with that as well, by providing as much information about the local area as possible in the form of adding map pins marking schools, transport and other local services.  But it helps if our partners understand why we're asking them for so much detail.

The bottom line is that if we're able to give house hunters the best lot of results first time round they'll be happy.  And as far as our partners go Nestoria Rank dramatically improves the ratio between the number of serious enquiries they get and the number of people who take a peek and move on.  And we get a happy buzz about the awesomeness of our search technology.  So everyone's a winner. 

Less is more when it comes to pageviews

Normally websites pride themselves on generating a large number of pageviews from visitors - it means people are hanging around on their site for a while, looking at a few things – but for a vertical search like Nestoria the quicker we can give visitors exactly what they want the better.  A couple of weeks ago there was some intensive testing done on the UK site to help expedite people to their ideal listing, and the results: in technical speak Nestoria has gone to a full AJAX implementation.   In layman's terms that basically means that the search information inputted is remembered when the sliders or map is moved so the lists should still have the most relevant content in them.  The good news for the Australian site is that we'll automatically inherit the improvements.

Nestoria can always get better though, so there are always all sorts of tests going on on the sites to see how we can make it even easier to match people and homes.  If you have any suggestions it's always the time to speak up.

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.

Putting our content where our blog text is

All this talk about finding interesting data and mashing it together and pinning it down to a map - if you don't mind the rough housing description - may make you wonder what Nestoria is doing to promote this sort of thing – apart from getting excited about it on the blog.    Nestoria is putting its content where it's blog text is, by making our API available to developers  interested in mashing or layering it up or using it to create something new and exciting on the web.

The Nestoria API has been around since the early days when you could get a thumbnail, details of the property and a link for more information, but it's undergone a lot of improvements and updates since then; including increasing the image sizes and allowing different kinds of search filtering, from highest and lowest prices to land size or number of bathrooms.

The Nestoria team have watched with interest and sometimes excitement as a whole range of cool things have been done with the data on the API, the current faves are  iphone applications UKProperty, Locati and Property Near Me.

As yet no one has mashed up Nestoria's average house price data, and some senior members of the Nestoria team would love to see that happen if anyone has any ideas...

If you're not a developer the API might sound a bit beyond you, but that's not going to stop you from having your own co-branded version of Nestoria onto which you can cut and paste property lists and listings and embed dropin maps into – this is all available at the exceptional good value price of free.

As of yet the Australian site isn't accessible, but it's only a matter of time.