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africajam

Re:Before Rightmove, there was the Cosmorama on Monday August 17, 2026 @03:32AM (#49327512)
Every year rightmove uses statistics about how much time people spend on their website to justify raising prices.

Sellers, buyers and agents end up paying for the "htm" (hidden toll machine) that is rightmove.

The more we can chip away at the time people spend on rightmove the better chance we have a challenging the "htm".

Instead of sharing the link to rightmove with your spouse, friend etc remove the "htm" and share the rigove link instead.

Similar principle to how xcancel drives traffic away from the empire of Musk.

Re:Before Rightmove, there was the Cosmorama on Sunday August 16, 2026 @04:33PM (#49323401)
Ha ha, nice.

Annoying though that rightmove have become seen now as synonymous with house hunting in the UK. They are massively abusing that position and there is a £1.5bn claim against them in the courts right now.

I really hope they lose that claim but in the mean time I am doing my bit to try to get traffic back to estate agents from rightmove.

If you take out "htm" from the domain name while browsing a rightmove listing it will take you to a page where you can (in some instances) find a link to the same property on the estate agent's site.

The success of rigove will depend on getting a snowball effect going and right now I'm doing everything I can to build on the initial momentum.

Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026) on Sunday August 09, 2026 @04:08PM (#49235258)
I'm genuinely curious - are you saying this because you know quite a bit about trademark violation?
Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026) on Sunday August 09, 2026 @03:38PM (#49234925)
I put my flat in the UK on the market recently and it has given me a lot of insights into how broken the real estate market is! One thing I found particularly annoying is how dominant rightmove is and how much of the traffic for house hunting they control.

As a small way of standing up to them I created https://rigove.co.uk/ (rightmove without htm - the hidden toll machine ;)

If you change rightmove to rigove while browsing a property for sale you get a page which shows where else that property is listed.

It is only a few days old so it is currently more miss than hit but I plan to reach out to estate agents to increase coverage as quick as I can.

Re:Travis CI acquired by Idera on Wednesday January 23, 2019 @10:16AM (#18978792)
Yes, I have fond memories of hanging out in their offices above beta house. Amazingly welcoming bunch of people and one of the best things about the Berlin tech scene for me. Hope it works out well for them. I know they were never in it for the money but they deserve a decent payout for their years of commitment.
Re:Show HN: A tool to explore 100+ coworking retreats on Friday October 05, 2018 @02:01PM (#18150261)
Nice tool - what tech stack are you using?

I built this with Ruby on Rails and would love to see people using it for projects like what you've done:

https://github.com/etewiah/property_web_builder

If you are interested in adapting it for your use case let me know and I'll do my best to help.

Introduce yourself here:

https://talk.birmingham.io/

Its a very friendly bunch of geeks - someone there might be able to help. There is a fair amount of tech activity in Birmingham so you could get lucky. Good luck.

Its a great idea but as someone pointed out, it seems more like a feature than a full product. You would also benefit from targeting a specific market.

I create a website builder for the real estate sector and I started off by open sourcing it:

https://github.com/etewiah/property_web_builder

This gave me some credibility in the sector and I have now been contacted by many people wanting help with their website.

I want to launch a SaaS that focuses on the real estate sector so if you are open to collaborating I'll be happy to discuss that.

Very well presented website - I like it a lot.

Would be interesting to see some reports about the real estate plugins available for Wordpress. I did a quick review myself and did not find any really high quality plugins but would be good to see some more detailed analysis.

This is a short article I wrote about real estate plugins in WordPress:

https://smallbusinessforum.co/why-an-alternative-to-wordpres...

Yeah, I hope its something like that because if he actually thinks the commit is a good idea then he really is taking the piss.
I got this pull request today and it really makes me wonder if U shouldn't just close down my open source project. For me its the equivalent of someone sticking a finger up at me after eating the free lunch I just gave them.....
Not an abandoned project but I really could do with some help on this open source website builder for the real estate sector:

https://github.com/etewiah/property_web_builder

For anyone looking to build a product that relies on aggregating real estate data I've built an open source web scraper specifically for real estate:

https://github.com/RealEstateWebTools/property_web_scraper

If you decide to open source your project, please share the link here. Thanks
Nice, thanks for sharing! I built a simple scraper and I need to add background processing etc:

https://github.com/RealEstateWebTools/property_web_scraper

Will dig into your code to see what I can learn.

Hi there, a sector in which web scraping is quite important is real estate. I have written an open source scraper for that sector (using Nokogiri and Ruby on Rails):

https://github.com/RealEstateWebTools/property_web_scraper

Take a look and let me know what you think. I have a few ideas about how to monetize. Get in touch if this is something you would like to work with me on ( ed at propertywebbuilder.com )

Re:Ask HN: Small Open source projects that need contributions on Saturday February 10, 2018 @06:24PM (#16350230)
Would alway appreciate some help with this:

https://github.com/etewiah/property_web_builder

It is an open source real estate website builder

Re:Ask HN: Can a company be built using open source code? on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @04:37PM (#16328247)
I'm hoping so though from where I am now it looks like it will be a long road ahead ;)

https://opencollective.com/property_web_builder

This project started as a way to import listings into an open source website builder I created.

Right now it effectively scrapes single pages that the user provides. It won't be too hard to enable crawling so that from one page it discovers others and scrapes those too.

Will be interesting to hear if anyone has some ideas about how I could monetise it in the longer term.

Listening to classical music really helps me. It took a while for it to make a difference but now it has become my way of signalling to my brain that its time to concentrate.
Re:Funding Yourself as a Free Software Developer on Wednesday December 20, 2017 @01:28PM (#15972318)
I signed up with opencollective some weeks ago and yesterday got my first backer: https://opencollective.com/property_web_builder . Only $2 a month but it still cheered me up. Fingers crossed it gains some momentum over the coming months. It is a good concept well implemented.
Re:Show HN: Enviar.io – Real estate landing pages on Saturday December 09, 2017 @05:59AM (#15885251)
I've created an open source project for scraping real estate sites: https://github.com/RealEstateWebTools/property_web_scraper

You could use it to save people the trouble of filling out all the details for their property - they just provide the url for the property on a portal site that is supported and you import the details from there.

Re:Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (September 2017) on Friday September 01, 2017 @02:52PM (#15151427)
SEEKING FREELANCER | Madrid, Spain | REMOTE PropertyWebBuilder is an open source real estate website builder. A few users are interested in a mobile app client and I am looking for someone who can create an iOS client for it. Looking to have it ready early next year so plenty of time to work on it part-time. Will prefer someone who is interested in the real estate space.

Website: http://propertywebbuilder.com

Think this is for you? Email work @ propertywebbuilder.com

Re:Ask HN: Building your own CRM vs. Salesforce/SugarCRM on Wednesday August 16, 2017 @05:26PM (#15031516)
I've built a real estate listings website from scratch using Ruby on Rails. It was harder than I expected but now I have a solid base from which I can build functionality quickly. The best part is that I open sourced it! Check it out and see if it can be useful for what you're working on:

https://github.com/etewiah/property_web_builder

Happy to help with any questions you might have.

I recently got offered $10,000 for my open source real estate website builder (PropertyWebBuilder) on condition I close down the project. Turned it down but still not entirely sure if it was the right decision.
Re:Show HN: Forum as a service, for GitHub projects on Monday July 24, 2017 @12:37PM (#14839916)
This is awesome! I don't understand why this hasn't got more upvotes. I've just created a forum for my project:

https://gitq.com/etewiah/property_web_builder

Now time to get people talking about it ;)

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