Zillow's data packaging is undoubtedly better than ours (analytics isn't yet very core to our business) but if you'd like to see rent values statically associated to MSAs and ZIP codes on a map, we publish that at https://dwellsy.com/rentmaps
Hey thanks for this. Im looking at this. But I’d still have to download spreadsheets and the data is aggregated by regions bigger than zipcodes I think. Im hoping my site offers a simple and straightforward experience
My project will average out the data on recent "sale-price over-or-under the asking-price" for an entire zipcode. This should produce a report showing you how things are trending. I hope this will help people make an informed decision.
Caveats :
1.This works for the USA only.
2.The report should take up to a minute to display as the data is being scraped from Zillow.
3.If the site does go down, it is due to the volume of traffic from reddit. Then I'm going to need to scale up my servers. I will try and stay on top of this.
4.If the no results are obtained, Zillow probably didn't have "sales" data for that zip code, or the connection to Zillow failed. I would just retry once again.
I'm looking for feedback on these points:
1. How do I monatise without adverts? I would hate to display ads and kill the experience.
2. Do you want similar trends? Eg. I could also show "Average days in the market for properties", "Similar zip codes for your budget." etc
3. Would you be willing to register and voluntarily give up some data ? I would like to know where you are searching from, it will help me build a database of "Where are people from and where are they looking to move?"
Can you recommend a zip code to try, I tried several in Northern Colorado and got "We did not get any results".
One way you could monetize would be to make deals with MLSes for integration into their services, either for realtors or for consumers. Can't tell how appropriate it would be for realtors, I assume it's more oriented towards consumers.
If there's some way to get to see Northern Colorado there, I can send it around to some POI in the local MLS and see what they think. Again, you might not be looking for MLS feedback.
Disclaimer: I run coloproperty.com and the MLS. :-)
How did you find yourself running those? What's your story if you don't mind me asking?
I've known many people who got into real estate (just getting a realtor's license) on the side as a way to make some extra money, but to me the appeal has always been having access to the "raw" MLS information / hearing about properties before anybody else.
Do you have any gut feeling for what percentage of properties never hit the market because of connections like these?
I would be very happy if my project gains attention from a product manager from Zillow and they say “Why don’t we just let him pay for the data”. I’m unable to get their attention and they’re very cryptic about their GraphQL API spec.
I found this interesting, and was immediately curious for more: what the data was like going back more than a month, if there are any correlations to number of bedrooms, school districts, or the like, etc. etc. I could imagine you coming up with very interesting auto-generated 40-50 page reports.
I would not pay for this now, but when I was on the real estate market last year I might have. You could target individual buyers or sellers ($5-20 or so for a single report), real estate agents (some sort of subscription), or both -- don't know what the best strategy is.
As a prototype, now the data is fetched from Zillow and cached. I’d have to start saving data to disk and run queries for what your asking. Which is possible, I’m trying to buy time to build this out. I need to attract investment also. Thanks for your kind words.
> How do I monatise without adverts? I would hate to display ads and kill the experience.
I'd say go ahead and display ads, just do it without being obnoxious. Limit ads to small static images hosted on your own domain or text links, keep them unobtrusive, and don't use Google or any other evil surveillance capitalism company.
Because the site is driven by zip code you've got a great opportunity to provide ads relevant to the area and not the specific user. Anyone who finds reasonable ads so off-putting that it would drive them away from your service will be using ad blockers anyway.
Personally, I never register for websites if they require an email address unless they have a need to know my identity to accomplish what I want from them. Your site wouldn't meet that requirement so no registration for you. I'll sign up for some sites that need a registration but don't require a legit email address but they don't get my real info (fake names, addresses, etc)
Remember that any information you collect you then have to retain, backup, secure, etc. and it puts on the hook for reporting data breaches and for gathering and handing all of that information over to governments and other parties in response to court orders. Never collect or store any more data than you absolutely need to and you'll have so much less to worry about.
If you really really want to make money without ads, limit the number of accesses to something sane and charge the people who hammer your site day after day or week after week some fee for the trouble. They obviously find your service useful so maybe a small fee would be worth it to most of them. Maybe you can even offer to automatically push the kinds of data they keep requesting over and over again to them in some way.
I think folks who are house hunting will find this useful when looking for comps (they will be getting information for multiple if not all houses in their target zip code in a table; they can easily digest the information in the table). So you could potentially charge a small fee (say $5 - $20) for house hunters to run this query and have the information available to them (say a link) for a month or so. During that period, they can click on the custom generated link and it will give them the most recent result.
Same thing for 'Average days in the market' but this will be targeted at those looking to sell.
The trick would be where to find these folks so they know about your service. Maybe advertise in housing forums or reddit (find the housing related forums)
If you scroll down you’ll see they made an error listing the property at 389million instead of 3.89 million. I’ll have to use some upper /lower limits in the graph to bump out outliers like this . It’s hard to pick a number, some distress sale properties get sold for very low prices
Thanks for the feedback. My original plan was to load the data “live” as obtained using web sockets but that damn socket.io is proving to be unreliable. I’ll land up doing something like you recommended.
As for the “loading property of undefined” , thanks for the report. A code cleanup is long overdue
Fun fact. I used a beautiful image I took of cordoba Spain from the top of the mezquita as the backdrop. Someone on Reddit called me a Brazilian slum lord :(. So I put this San Francisco stock image
OP here, experiencing the HN kiss of death. Load balancer 502s .I’ve increased the number of docker containers across the entire stack. Hopefully it copes up with the load. My aws bill will be hiiiigh
Good luck with this. Scraping may be legal, but redistributing the data probably isn't. I expect the real estate cartel protects their MLS data pretty aggressively, otherwise there would be dozens of sites like this already. https://apnews.com/article/technology-lifestyle-business-pro...
Read the whole article. How can I compete with a cartel? I’m doomed. Maybe take this idea as-is and switch countries to the British market is also an idea I’m thinking
This sort of data is reasonably accessible in the UK, although perhaps not quite to the same degree as your app. Either way, I suspect the value-add is less than it would be in the US.
Rightmove, the primary property app in the UK, gives you the previous price the properties were purchased for, although perhaps not analytics across an area per se.
Homeowners who are selling don't want their data locked up. This should be a class-action suit. I bet there are a dozen attorneys who'd take on this case. You may not make out personally, but a condition can be the opening of listing data. Its locked nature should be considered problematic at best for fair housing rules.
Rofl. No! Got priced out after having bid 35k over asking price. Because you know, people have more money… I’m renting in NJ right now. Hoping this side gig leads somewhere
"Generating the report for 84058, this will take a while!" contains two independent clauses. They should not be separated by a comma. They should be separated by a period. It should read "Generating the report for 84058. This will take a while!"
Very nice! Properties in the area I’m interested in are now selling for 7% below asking price whereas a year ago they were getting 30% above asking price. On a different site, several properties that I saw sell in the past few months have relisted. It’s obvious they overbought or were speculating and are trying to get out now.
I can’t wait for the business study of how much wealth the Property Brothers end up destroying - should be much more interesting then the story of the guy who stopped putting olives on the airline salads.
How is this different from Redfin's sale-to-list data, and why do people use Zillow instead of Redfin when superficially at least Zillow appears to be wrong about everything?
Readit News
> Median List Price: The median price at which homes across various geographies were listed.
> Median Sale Price: The median price at which homes across various geographies were sold.
> Sale-to-List Ratio (mean/median): Ratio of sale vs. final list price.
> Percent of Sales under/over List: Ratio of sales where Sale Price below/above the final list price; excludes homes sold for exactly the list price.
It uses the Zillow data set mentioned above. I would suggest giving it a shot as well, the graphs are rudimentary but they work well enough for me. :)
Caveats :
1.This works for the USA only.
2.The report should take up to a minute to display as the data is being scraped from Zillow.
3.If the site does go down, it is due to the volume of traffic from reddit. Then I'm going to need to scale up my servers. I will try and stay on top of this.
4.If the no results are obtained, Zillow probably didn't have "sales" data for that zip code, or the connection to Zillow failed. I would just retry once again.
I'm looking for feedback on these points:
1. How do I monatise without adverts? I would hate to display ads and kill the experience.
2. Do you want similar trends? Eg. I could also show "Average days in the market for properties", "Similar zip codes for your budget." etc
3. Would you be willing to register and voluntarily give up some data ? I would like to know where you are searching from, it will help me build a database of "Where are people from and where are they looking to move?"
4. Any thing that will help me improve is good.
One way you could monetize would be to make deals with MLSes for integration into their services, either for realtors or for consumers. Can't tell how appropriate it would be for realtors, I assume it's more oriented towards consumers.
If there's some way to get to see Northern Colorado there, I can send it around to some POI in the local MLS and see what they think. Again, you might not be looking for MLS feedback.
Disclaimer: I run coloproperty.com and the MLS. :-)
How did you find yourself running those? What's your story if you don't mind me asking?
I've known many people who got into real estate (just getting a realtor's license) on the side as a way to make some extra money, but to me the appeal has always been having access to the "raw" MLS information / hearing about properties before anybody else.
Do you have any gut feeling for what percentage of properties never hit the market because of connections like these?
Monetizing data acquired through scraping could run afoul of copyrights, so the love letters would probably only arrive once OP attempts monetization.
I found this interesting, and was immediately curious for more: what the data was like going back more than a month, if there are any correlations to number of bedrooms, school districts, or the like, etc. etc. I could imagine you coming up with very interesting auto-generated 40-50 page reports.
I would not pay for this now, but when I was on the real estate market last year I might have. You could target individual buyers or sellers ($5-20 or so for a single report), real estate agents (some sort of subscription), or both -- don't know what the best strategy is.
I'd say go ahead and display ads, just do it without being obnoxious. Limit ads to small static images hosted on your own domain or text links, keep them unobtrusive, and don't use Google or any other evil surveillance capitalism company.
Because the site is driven by zip code you've got a great opportunity to provide ads relevant to the area and not the specific user. Anyone who finds reasonable ads so off-putting that it would drive them away from your service will be using ad blockers anyway.
Personally, I never register for websites if they require an email address unless they have a need to know my identity to accomplish what I want from them. Your site wouldn't meet that requirement so no registration for you. I'll sign up for some sites that need a registration but don't require a legit email address but they don't get my real info (fake names, addresses, etc)
Remember that any information you collect you then have to retain, backup, secure, etc. and it puts on the hook for reporting data breaches and for gathering and handing all of that information over to governments and other parties in response to court orders. Never collect or store any more data than you absolutely need to and you'll have so much less to worry about.
If you really really want to make money without ads, limit the number of accesses to something sane and charge the people who hammer your site day after day or week after week some fee for the trouble. They obviously find your service useful so maybe a small fee would be worth it to most of them. Maybe you can even offer to automatically push the kinds of data they keep requesting over and over again to them in some way.
I think folks who are house hunting will find this useful when looking for comps (they will be getting information for multiple if not all houses in their target zip code in a table; they can easily digest the information in the table). So you could potentially charge a small fee (say $5 - $20) for house hunters to run this query and have the information available to them (say a link) for a month or so. During that period, they can click on the custom generated link and it will give them the most recent result.
Same thing for 'Average days in the market' but this will be targeted at those looking to sell.
The trick would be where to find these folks so they know about your service. Maybe advertise in housing forums or reddit (find the housing related forums)
Well, selling it to Zillow is probably a natural fit. Or some other realtor org, but you'd probably have to change the source of your data.
They spend a ton of money on market analysis products because most of them don't have any sort of background that helps with it.
If it helps them get 1 more client or help a listing sell for just a couple % more it has paid for itself.
Button it up a bit, paywall it, run every zipcode as a job and cache the fully rendered html report the end user sees.
If you scroll down you’ll see they made an error listing the property at 389million instead of 3.89 million. I’ll have to use some upper /lower limits in the graph to bump out outliers like this . It’s hard to pick a number, some distress sale properties get sold for very low prices
edit: One other thing, it showed "Loading property 6 of undefined..." then back to "We did not get any results" which seems quirky.
As for the “loading property of undefined” , thanks for the report. A code cleanup is long overdue
I'm pretty sure the splash image is London, UK. Very confusing!
https://www.housedigest.com/874861/the-iconic-san-francisco-...
Rightmove, the primary property app in the UK, gives you the previous price the properties were purchased for, although perhaps not analytics across an area per se.
I can’t wait for the business study of how much wealth the Property Brothers end up destroying - should be much more interesting then the story of the guy who stopped putting olives on the airline salads.