To understand how we could support the demand on our service we turned to Snowdrop Solutions, a Google Cloud Premier Partner, for help. In January 2019, we launched the free trial of Homesearch Pro, our product for property professionals, and by lunchtime that same day, we had more than 1,000 users. We wanted to make navigation as easy as possible for our users and Google Maps Platform was key to achieving that, combining smooth performance with an intuitive, easy-to-use interface. Plotted on a map, you can see within seconds how close a house might be to schools, or transport links. We decided to use Google Maps Platform to visualize our data and provide a quick, clear context to every property. Our goal was to make all of this information easily available to the property industry, but we didn’t want to simply present our customers with a set of tables and filters. By the time we were done, we had built a database with 24 billion individual items of information. For every property that had missing information, our team of data scientists used customized algorithms to model the missing data with the highest degree of accuracy possible. It’s quite easy to pick 200 houses with the right characteristics out of a list of 10,000, but it’s a much bigger challenge to find out every single detail about one specific property. While there is a large amount of publicly available data on properties, it is held in disparate sources and often needs extensive cleaning. We spent the first year and a half collecting, verifying, and cleaning all the data available on 29 million properties in the UK. We wanted to help them understand everything they could about any property in the United Kingdom to make it easier for agents to identify and move properties more quickly and help connect interested buyers with motivated sellers. We co-founded Homesearch to build a research platform for professionals in the real estate industry. Sam and I had separately identified a clear gap in the market and intended to fill it. There was no centralized, comprehensive way of researching property. When he first arrived, he was shocked to find out that his office only had paper files to research from, and even these were restricted to sales from that particular branch. At around the same time, I met Sam Hunter, an Australian estate agent who had recently moved to London. It was clear that even the professionals didn’t have access to the data they needed. I soon realized that my real estate clients were as interested in the database as they were in advertising with us. My previous experience as a publisher of lifestyle and property magazines involved building up a large, customized, database of addresses to target. Homesearch was founded in 2017, initially as a platform for real estate professionals. Making more than 28 million properties easily searchable We’ve used Google Maps Platform to create an easy-to-use, map-led search experience that enables people to navigate the property market as seamlessly as possible. In September 2020, we launched our property search product to the public, and we wanted it to be more than just a classified ads site. At Homesearch, we want to create a more hassle-free experience by making information easy to find and easy to share, whether you’re looking for a property, or selling one. But with so many factors to consider, and so many options available, it can also be one of the most confusing. Editor's Note: Today's guest post comes from Giles Ellwood, CEO and Co-Founder of Homesearch, a technology company at the forefront of United Kingdom property data, working to create a more informed, connected, and proactive property market for everyone.įor most people, buying a home will be the biggest purchase of their life.
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