We're a small team of 3 engineers, and wanted to make a better way to look for for properties online. Traditional portals (esp. outside of US) are just a bit rubbish for doing anything other than basic searching.<p>So we've:<p>- Created a crawler that reads through estate agents websites to find homes for sale<p>- Parses that through a series of LLMs and other models to understand each home in depth (e.g. floor type, location, total sqft)<p>- Parses every photo through an embeddings vector space so that people can search for whatever they want.<p>Check it out: <a href="https://jitty.com" rel="nofollow">https://jitty.com</a><p>Currently only for home sales (not rentals), and only in the UK.<p>Some examples:<p>- "Beautiful church conversions up to £1m" <a href="https://jitty.com/for-sale/price-up-to-1000000-gbp/detached-or-semi-detached-or-terraced-or-bungalow-property-type/look-for-beautiful_church_conversions" rel="nofollow">https://jitty.com/for-sale/price-up-to-1000000-gbp/detached-...</a><p>- "Floor to ceiling libraries with a ladder" <a href="https://jitty.com/for-sale/look-for-floor_to_ceiling_libraries_with_a_ladder" rel="nofollow">https://jitty.com/for-sale/look-for-floor_to_ceiling_librari...</a><p>- "Home in london, under £1m, with big beautiful windows" <a href="https://jitty.com/for-sale/london/price-up-to-1000000-gbp/detached-or-semi-detached-or-terraced-or-flat-or-maisonette-or-bungalow-property-type/look-for-big_beautiful_windows" rel="nofollow">https://jitty.com/for-sale/london/price-up-to-1000000-gbp/de...</a><p>- "Bathtubs with an epic view" <a href="https://jitty.com/for-sale/look-for-bathtubs_with_an_epic_view" rel="nofollow">https://jitty.com/for-sale/look-for-bathtubs_with_an_epic_vi...</a>
We did this in 2013, got serve with a lot of lawsuit. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeighborCity" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeighborCity</a><p>Be careful with the real estate industry
<i>"Floor to ceiling libraries with a ladder"</i><p>Does that mean it excludes most of the results from "Floor to ceiling libraries <i>without</i> a ladder"?<p>You know, if I'm buying a house, I think I can supply my own ladder separately...<p>Less pedantically, what I'm trying to say is: are you really sure these are the kinds of searches that home buyers are really looking for? "Home in london, under £1m, with big beautiful windows" - I suspect that most London buyers are going to care an awful lot about <i>where</i> in London the house is, a city-wide search isn't going to be useful to most. Maybe your functionality (as presented) won't inspire actual buyers.<p>Speaking of which, that might be a way to improve it - combine with location & mapping data to figure out nearby transport, services, schools, etc...
Not from the UK so sorry if this is off-topic, but what are those "dettached" hosues for around 60k? Do they have their own "land"? or you are buying that space "inside" another house? (so in the end you are at the actual owner's mercy?)
If you’re scraping the estate agents’ sites rather than striking licensing agreements, I can see how you might justify analysing the images to build a property profile but when you’re reproducing them on your site how do you get round the photographer’s copyright?
- I liked the 'surprise' button because I wasn't sure what to type in the search box. I'm so used to typing a location by default.
- I like your examples in this HN post and also the categories below the fold.
- I like that I can favorite things without registering an account. I've been experimenting with guest accounts and blank states on my site.
- When I search for multiple words from the search tab, acts funny. "big windows" became "big". I tried a refresh and the autocomplete said "big windows", but submitting with enter filtered it to "Bath, UK". Maybe there's some timing issue here with fast submits?
- I prefer the screenshots / pitch you have on the app store over the website. I like the idea of browsing and filtering, rather than starting with a specific search. Again, that first point that this is something different than location search and helping me understand what I'm supposed to do.<p>Beautiful site, well done! I love the idea. I'm based in the US.
Does your crawler respect robots.txt? Does it request pages with nice delays so that it doesn't bring down servers? Related: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43422413">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43422413</a>
It is an interesting product but I really do wonder if it is something users are asking for.
In the market jitty is going for I would say that discovering what is on any given real estate website is not the big pain point.
Thankfully, this is within UK because Realtor.com is that monopolistic chokepoint of multiple-listing services (MLS) in North America.<p>If I were you, I quickly package your website for an acquisition by Zoopla and Rightmove.<p>Future is bright but they dont want you to succeed and may restort to costly litigation, just to stifle you a bit while they get their similar "act" together.<p>Quick sale and use that proceeds to move on you becoming the next hot acquisition target.
I like the idea! I typed in "futuristic" which got some wild results. The problem is that some properties will have one crazy photo of a single room (sometimes in the lobby of a block of flats) that is nothing like the rest of the property on offer. One property even showed the escalators of a local Underground station as its primary thumbnail, which were kinda futuristic looking.
Nice one! I would love if it could use coordinates too. Like, "Pool and outdoor shower near me" or "Flower garden with 1h commute to work <drop google marker>"<p>I know it's hard to figure out time depending on your transportation but at least that would not give me search results from the other side of the country.
Can you run all your photos through a focal length/depth of field transform to match the human eye? Real estate agents like to bait and switch and waste people's time with glamorous photos that are made using focals lengths that are very different from actual humans.
Improvement suggestion: Keep the search text in the search field when you show the results. The 'what are you looking for' box gets cleared when you show the results, it would be nicer if the search text was kept so that you could tweak it.
"Bathroom with an epic view": <a href="https://jitty.com/properties/TOFkSADP9QuQAV03XTbg?i=78042905" rel="nofollow">https://jitty.com/properties/TOFkSADP9QuQAV03XTbg?i=78042905</a>
It's strange that searches add a filter pill with a cross, but a new search just replaces all the filters. It would be great to iteratively build up filters.
really cool idea. rightmove is awful for searching for houses. I basically can't filter by features at all. though their map search feature is cool cos i might not want to search in an entire county. though i get your probs mvp-ing. really slick though<p>also there are no houses for Cheshire on your site. replication steps: type cheshire in the search bar and click the suggestion (Cheshire, UK) = 0 results.
Hi, this looks really cool.<p>What LLM’s are you using ?<p>And how is this working “Parses every photo through an embeddings vector space so that people can search for whatever they want”<p>Thank you