Wish I knew it when I was moving to Munich 6 months ago. Sounds like a tough job, some of those sites aren't structured very well. I thought about automating it too, but it seemed like too much hassle back then.

I have to say though, when you are a german couple, have a double income with no children/no pets, its not that hard to find something. I don't envy the rest though!

One of our biggest challenges is making the service known. The problem is real estate is a low frequency category. When you are searching, you care a lot, when you aren't you couldn't care less. As a result, even if we do a great job, once you find a place you gone.

We've been doing it for many years and have tried many things, but if anyone has further suggestions always happy to learn.

I imagine, real estate keywords are probably very expensive. Also, I have an ad blocker.

In cities like Munich, speed is very important - is your search real-time or at least near rt? If so, I'd advertise that. I need to be sure I'm not missing any offerings, and that they aren't slower to show than when going to the 'real' site.

Ha! Unfortunately nothing about the real estate industry is real time.

We do the best we can and push our partners to do the same. Over the years it is getting better, but it is not close to what consumers want.

That said, speed is a much bigger issue in some markets (rentals in cities like Munich) and much less in others (buying a house out in a village).

Wow, good to know! I'm currently looking for a flat in Berlin and will definitely use the site. Let's see if I also write some automation around it as the OP apparently did :)

Question: how does nestoria make money? Do you get some cut from immowelt etc. in case you end up renting/buying?

We generate leads for our partners, the same model as all search engines.

That's a really cool site, I wish I knew about it when I was looking for a flat in London.

How do you compare to the more popular sites such as Zoopla?

Glad you like it. If you're interested in any of the tech behind the scenes, please check out our dev blog: http://devblog.nestoria.com

It's really hard to build something simple, especially in more chaotic markets like India and Brazil.

re: Zoopla, they are one of our best partners. They are a great portal, we are a search engine. Complimentary tools for different tasks.

Do you scrape those sites, or use their rss feeds or ... ? I think it's a great concept, just wonder about the legality of it.

We have contracts with and datafeeds from all of them. We've been in business since 2006, in Germany since 2008.

We work very closely with our partners to try to improve the data. It's not always easy. I gave a talk about this at csv,conf in Berlin in July, slides are here: http://www.slideshare.net/lokku/a-living-hell-lessons-learne...

Great slides, thanks a lot for the link.

"Unless you hate life, do NOT try to scrape real estate data"

With this conclusion, do you mean web scraping or just processing the datafeeds of your partners?

Haha, I went through a smaller-scale version of those problems, and your presentation is spot-on :) , I can totally relate.

If I search for appartments to let in germany, the flyout menu only offers to filter for buying prices. See screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/BmUd4bh.png

Thanks for making me aware.

Thanks for the link, your site is brilliant!

Thanks, you should tell EVERYONE you know.

In seriousness though, while we do try our best (not just in Germany, but eight other countries as well), the situation he describes is one that the internet doesn't do a good job of solving. Basically demand way outstrips supply in cities like Munich. As a result, if you have a good flat or house you want to rent out, really all you need to do is tell 5-10 people and via word of mouth you'll very quickly have more than enough high quality applicants. You really don't need online tools.

An interesting result is that we're now starting to see start-ups that reverse the model. In Köln/Düsseldorf there is https://salzundbrot.com (a Nestoria partner) who are free for owners/landlords, but charge applicants a small fee to make contact. Will be interesting to see if it catches on.

The reality though is there is just way more demand than supply. Normally that would be solved by price rises, but the rate of rent increases is reguated by law.

All that said, while I have sympathy with Munich renters, I now live in central London, where the problem is at another order of magnitude. As I always say "London isn't expensive, the rest of the world is cheap".

As somebody unfamiliar with London but considering moving there, it would be great if instead of specifying a geographical radius for the search I could specify a commuting time radius with respect to the City. This would probably be useful even to natives, as I'm sure there are probably many areas where people overestimate commuting times and consequently avoid an area that otherwise should see greater housing demand (thereby levelling out demand and prices, in time, in other areas).

Of course I understand implementing something like this is quite complex, and you'd most likely have to precompute these things and limit it to a few common business centers as destinations, but it would be really preferable to my current strategy of "look for something that seems reasonably priced and then use another site to figure out if it falls within the 1hr commute window I'm looking for".

This gets asked for occasionally. The thing is though, there are not that many people who truly have no idea where they want to live. Most people have at least some idea based on where their friends already live, where they will be working, etc

Over the years I have seen numerous services that allowed people to search the way you describe. They all typically die out after a year or two, as all evidence suggests there just isn't enough volume of people searching the way you describe to sustain them.

So it's not something we'll focus on. Sorry, I know that's probably a frustrating answer for you.

Good luck with your hunt.

Thanks for the insight!

www.findproperly.co.uk

Perfect, thank you!

Checked out Salz und Brot - Cologne's where I lived for quite some time and where I'd like to return to in the future. Family just didn't make it viable - the rent is just too high/we can't afford it and moved elsewhere.

And just to confirm the craziness the first apartment I checked out in Cologne [1] (for fun, not seriously planning to move atm) requires you to pay 1300 EUR for the kitchen (sure, makes sense), a bit of furniture (common) and - I wonder what they're smoking - the floor (Echtholzboden). You're "buying" the floor in a rented apartment? Look at the pictures. Are you going to take that with you when you move out?

Not sure if that's something you care about, but you mention that this site is a partner of yours. The UI's broken in my browser (Aurora/Firefox Nightly) - if you got contacts that might be something to look into? [2]

1: https://salzundbrot.com/suche/#!search={"f2":1000}&x=1&view=...

2: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1194203/SalzUndBrot.png

thanks, I've passed it on.

Sounds like we really have it good here in Berlin, even though everyone is still complaining...