Hi all,

Some of you may know that Beki and I have recently been looking for a new home, well today we found one but that’s not why I am posting today.

I want to bring to bring to your attention “Property Search Aggregators”. These are websites which grab properties (often both rentals and sales) from various sources (agents and agent indexes) and displays them to the users with some funky search technology and filters. I guess you could call it a “delegator” (to talk in a meta-systems perspective, or even an object-oriented perspective).

These four are of particular interest:

  1. Nestoria: an amazingly easy-to-use interface where you search for a location, and it comes up on a google map. It provides dimension filters such as how many bedrooms, and the price range. Plus there are further trivalued logic filters (yes-either-false), for things like Garden and Garage etc. Incredibly easy to use, and a site I recommend greatly. Nestoria is also available for countries other than those in the UK.
  2. Globrix: Much more awkward to use than Nestoria, but if you can work through that you’ll find that Globrix is packed with a lot more functionality than Nestoria, with more filters and an interesting “or” based logic search for locations. Quite neat :-)
  3. FindAProperty: FindAProperty is advertised in the local newspapers over here in Bristol, England. It is an ok site, not as clean as Globrix and Nestoria, but tends to be a little more up-to-date in terms of availability of properties.
  4. PrimeLocation: This aggregator has a nice colour scheme, it works ok, but its a lot better at providing miscellaneous additional information. It also serves a wide variety of other countries.

The one downside to these sites is that they are sometimes not updated with current statuses of the properties. For example, you may find that a rented property listed on one of the above sites is already taken, simply because its not connected to the agents systems in an effective fashion. What we ended up doing was searching on the above sites, looking at the agents sites to see if there were any further information (or an updated status), and also looking at the other properties on the agents websites. That seemed to work quite well, and that’s how we got our new home.

Thanks for reading!

Daniel