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Nestoria is a search engine that lets you quickly find housing in the UK. While I am not currently in the market for a flat, this product caught my eye because of how easy it is to use. All you do is enter the general area that you are searching within and then Nestoria helps you find all the houses in that area.

In case you aren’t sure where you want to look, Nestoria also provides a directory broken down by Regions, Postcodes and Cities. Ed Freyfogle, one of the founders of Nestoria was kind enough to answer a few questions for me.

Ed Freyfogle

Nestoria

During internet 1.0 days I worked for five years as a developer at Yahoo! Europe. Then I went and got an MBA at MIT before starting Nestoria in 2006.

Nestoria

What I really liked about Nestoria was how quick and easy it was to pick up. How did the idea originate? What was the problem you were trying to solve?

Thanks, glad you like it. We’re working hard to create the fastest and easiest way for people to find a home to buy or rent.

Our team doesn’t actually know much about property, we know about building search engines and measuring what happens on a website. We track how people use the site very closely and are continually learning and tweaking the algorithms. We focus a lot on creating a good default experience, and we try to use a lot of the new techniques

An example: let’s say you want to find a flat to rent in Canary Wharf, a part of London. On most sites they default to sorting by price, which means you either get shown expensive things that no one can afford (too expensive), or total dumps that no one
wants (too cheap). We instead use our own quality algorithm (we call it “Nestoria Rank” to try to give the user relevant flats that he or she will be interested in learning about immediately.

We also mash the results up with local transportation data, schools, pictures of the area, pubs, parking spaces and a lot more. To be honest the challenge we’re continually confronted with is keeping it simple. There are so much data we could put in the user’s face, but instead we work hard to have it there only when you want it.

And of course we let you subscribe via RSS, have widgets if you feel like putting properties on your website or blog, offer an API, Facebook application, etc, etc - all the standard web2.0 stuff.

I have no doubts we can do better, but so far we’ve had a lot of positive feedback. Recently we were used by Google as their case study for use of the Google Maps API, and we were the only start up invited to speak at Google developer day in London.

New Markets

Do you plan to expand into additional markets? If so, which ones and why?

We just launched Spain in mid-May. It has gone very well, both in terms of the response from the users and the response from the industry. We know we still have a lot to learn, we’ve been doing lots of fine tuning.

We’re looking at other markets now.

Advertising

Your product is advertising free. How, if at all, do you plan to generate revenue?

We get asked a lot whether we’d like to cover the site in mortgage ads. Call me crazy, but I think if someone wanted a mortgage, they would search for a mortgage, not a house or a flat. We focus on helping people find what they’re actually looking for.

We generate revenue via the leads we generate. Many sites want cost-effective, high-performing, low-maintenance traffic directly to their listings. We provide it.

The Burning Question

I try to ask all of the entrepreneurs that I interview this. As entrepreneurs, do you have any advice for people who have an idea but just don’t know where to start or how to get it off the ground?

My main advice would be to always remember that your most valuable resource is your time. Are you using it effectively? Having good ideas isn’t hard, knowing which idea to focus on, which to outsource, which to skip altogether, that’s the skill.

Beyond that, all I can say is hire great people. We’ve been very lucky to attract a first class team.

Web 2.0 Roundup

If you want to reach Ed and the rest of the team, I suggest visiting Nestoria and using their contact form. They would love to hear from you. Also, take some time to visit their blog.

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