Welcome to Nestoria, Find Properly
Hi everyone,
I have some good news to share - Find Properly will be joining the Nestoria family!
For those of you not familiar with Find Properly, it is a great service (there's no need to take our word on that, industry commentators agree) focused on helping Londoners find a new place to live. Unlike Nestoria, where our search has always been driven first and foremost by location, Find Properly allows buyers or renters to search more broadly, specifying where they need to be for work or university, and then showing a range of locations that meet their criteria. It's a different approach, one that appeals to a segment of the market we don't currently serve well. Find Properly's growth over the last year shows confirms the demand, especially in a global city like London that is continually attracting new inhabitants from around the world, for such a service.
In addition, Peter Thum-Bonanno, the founder of Find Properly, has done great work creating various data visualizations that allow anyone to explore the relationships behind the mass of data that any search service has.
As an example, here's a screenshot of one of his tools that makes clear the trade off between commute time and price:
Most of our team is based in London, so we've been tracking Find Properly since it launched a bit over a year ago. When Peter approached us about whether Nestoria might be a good home for Find Properly, we jumped at the chance to not only add this great service to the portfolio, but also to learn from someone who has taken a fresh approach to the problem of finding a place to live. Having spent more than eight years working on Nestoria I'm proud to admit we can still learn from others, and many of the concepts behind Find Properly are pushing our thinking in creative new directions.
So, what happens next? Well, for existing Find Properly users not much actually. The site will continue to run as is, we have no plans to change a well working system. What we will be doing (and indeed have already started doing) is seeing if there are ways for us to learn from Peter's success and apply the ideas to the other markets we operates Nestoria in.
If you aren't yet familiar with Find Properly I encourage you to take the site for a spin and let us know what you think.
For those who revel in the glamor of the online property industry (as an industry veteran I can assure you it is indeed glorious), here's an action shot of the handshake between myself and Peter sealing the deal. Joining us are Andy, our CFO, and Mark who heads up our UK relationships.
There's some coverage and more background about the deal over on tech.eu.
Finally, for anyone who has ever wondered how Find Properly works I'm pleased to report Peter will be doing a guest post over on the Nestoria dev blog in the near future. Last week he came by the office and gave us an informative and entertaining tech talk, so I have no doubt it will be a great post.
Hopefully you're as excited as we are. Please join us in congratulating Peter on building a great service and welcoming Find Properly to the Nestoria family.
