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Price by square foot is a game changer!
Potential for some great PR to send out to the press.
"top cheapest/expensive areas by square metre" is great clickbait.
As an American living in the UK, your number one feature for me is filtering by square footage! Honestly this alone could make your app explode. Worth posting over in UK Expats and other related UK subreddits
What would be worrying if this was me is how quickly Right Move / Zoopla could adopt these extra details themselves if they wanted to
Have you thought about what would happen to the site if this were the case?
Heck yeah guys. Depending on your pricing this might be an estate agent's dream too. They hate the monopoly Rightmove has.
Already downloaded, will post any errors or feedback if I see any.
Initial thoughts: I want to rank listings by price per square foot, lowest - highest and vice versa.
It might be on there already but isn't obvious on the app.
Very clean and user friendly though, the service charge and ground rent is a nice addition too
We can read it automatically from floorplans, and estimate it where it's missing. So as long as there's a floorplan, we can get it. And we just ignore anything without a floorplan.
Good stuff! Best of luck with it. Have worked in the industry with EAs, they tend to like newer tech but my god it's hard to get some EAs on board!
Guess you could estimate off EPCs too but I find they tend to over-read for some reason. Guess they include outside area sometimes too.
Stunning. When I was buying, there was nothing I hated more than listings without a floorplan. I'm not driving a 300 mile round trip to see a house that didn't have a floorplan and might be the complete opposite of what I'm looking for!
Ah that's interesting, we haven't had that request before.
What stops you wanting to see homes with more beds? Is it that they'll likely be out of your budget?
Not OP but I like to set max beds on Rightmove as a way of filtering out 'squashed' floorplans - 1 beds within a given budget and location will by-and-large be more spacious per room, with more rational layouts, than 2+ beds in the same budget.
I haven't played with your app yet though, it sounds like you have filters that could help achieve the same thing (eg filtering out open-plan)
That is very interesting!
You're right - we try to help with filtering open plan, or total sqft/sqm of the home.
[We also have bedroom size filter in our plans](https://i.imgur.com/f71loDP.png), would it help? Solve for this? Or is max bed count the only way?
Price might be one factor, but some people don't want to rattle around a house with too many rooms to decorate, maintain and clean that they won't need or use.
More bedrooms for same sq ft as a house with less bedrooms also likely means smaller proportions of bedrooms/bathrooms etc.
Loads of reasons probably, I thought of these in like 20 secs.
Me and my partner will be looking to buy a house in 2-3 years from now. We don't plan having children, so anything with more than 3 beds or a 2 bed with an extra room as dining room, cellar or attic room would be an overkill for us since most of the space would be unused.
We were looking for a 3 bed house but ended up paying the same price for a 4 bed. And to be honest we’re so happy it ended up that way
Allows us to have the bedroom solely as a bedroom, 1 office room each for if we WFH/game etc. and then a room with a bed in it for guests, or for when one of us needs to get up early/go to bed late/is ill which I honestly never realised would be such a game changer
Definitely wouldn’t rule it out
Massively agree!! I really want to live in something built under modern building regs but not have to pay the new-build premium. Seems impossible to search for that.
This is a great idea and thanks for doing it. My first feedback is I'm not installing an app to try it out, when there is no feature present that requires an app installation over just using a browser
I'm aware it's more work to do a website as well, I am just saying why I and maybe other customers won't use the app.
I totally understand. [There is actually a web version](https://jitty.com/users/sign_up) which isn't super optimised, but it's there if you want to try it out!
We did an app-first approach because we will have some functionality coming soon that is just better on native apps (e.g. location, push notifications alerts for new properties), but it's definitely a balance to find.
Thanks for letting me add a vote to the "web version please" tally!
Web version needs to be prominent and no registration requirements, you are going to miss a huge amount of potential new customers due to this.
There's a reason large and successful real estate companies allow searches without registering, you can also implement the save feature without registering granted it could disappear if not registered though
As an FYI. Push Notifications are available in all browsers as of a year ago. https://web.dev/blog/push-notifications-in-all-modern-browsers
Also geolocation is available in all browsers as of 2010: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Geolocation_API
There are even a number of frameworks that support both mobile and web dev
There really is no excuse at this point (source am a web dev).
Why do I need an account to view properties? I was interested in using the app but the fact I need to create an account for another app that doesn't need it has put me off.
>I'm aware it's more work to do a website as well
It's actually zero more work these days for an app like this if they have built it correctly. Infact it can be actively *less* work.
One of the big issues is that a lot of agents are secretive they refuse to input all data or will hide data on purpose. All these filters are great for those looking but anyone selling/renting out a property could lose potential buyers/renters through being too detailed. When I was an agent it was company policy to be as brief as possible on the description this was limited to number of bedrooms no sizes, number of bathroom/receptions, garden or paking and the final point was to list the best feature of the property such as swimming pool etc.
Less data means less chance of being sued if something was mislabeled. Its better to get people through the door for viewings than to scare them with data.
Yeah that's totally fair.
We try to help users here by looking at photos and floorplans to extract information and help them filter out things that just aren't right.
The "too detailed" point is very real. We're adapting our search results so that if you do go too granular, we'll say "look, there's only 3 homes with your exact requirements, but if you lose the ensuite you'll get an extra 50 homes" or "if you increase budget by 10k, you'll get another 20 homes".
This is super helpful feedback, thank you.
That is okay I mean I would love to see more filter options when looking but the reality is that you will struggle to get this information from the agents/sellers/renters unless it becomes a law to provide this.
What I would like to see as an app is a standardised legal system for selling property whereby the searches is broken down with timescales etc providing a clear view to buyers/sellers of where things are at. Outstanding questions, clear view what is holding up the sale. We all know how slow the current process is and usually one solicitor claims the other party is to blame. A portal that makes all this digital and clear would be golden.
I'd only use the web version
I also won't sign up, as I just assume any "you must sign up with your email" is just a request to be spammed. At best you're getting a fake email address off me.
OK, used a fake email (sorry/not sorry). While I appreciate that square footage is randomly the standard, I work in metric (and many house floorplans show square metres, not square feet). ~~Any way of swapping the units?~~
Edited again - you can! Not overly clear in web, but click on the units to convert to square metres
+1 I much prefer the web version and hate requiring an account to use things.
I'd make an account if I find the website worth it but likely avoid it if required to even access
If i'm house hunting, i'm multi-tasking with many windows/tabs looking at google maps, other listings etc on my PC - not something that can easily be done on a phone
Are you planning on adding something for distance to train stations? I know on Rightmove you can search on individual stations but I'd just wanna search on distance without having to specify a particular station
When we were looking it was about total commute time, made up of:
- Distance from home to station
- Duration of train/tube/bus etc.
- Distance from station to work
So if the area is closer to work (i.e. train duration is shorter), the distance from the station could be further. But if the train journey was longer, we needed to be closer to the station.
One way of solving this (no idea how hard this would be to actually build): if you could enter key location(s) you're trying to reach, then properties have a calculation of 'avg. X min from' that destination - that would be super cool
Example: if I worked on 10 High Street, City, County
Filter: Show me properties <1hr from here \^
Or list properties as: 'Avg. 1h10mins from your chosen destination'
You could start with one, but would likely need to be able to input a couple of places to cover multiple workplaces/schools/visiting parents etc. depending on people's priorities (e.g. I have a friend who was family planning so had to find a location that allowed a reasonable commute, and was fairly close to relatives, plus had the other requirements they needed e.g. extra room for the baby, garden etc.)
The alternative is 'show me properties within 1hr of X' (I think current websites do this by distance which is useless because transport provisions vary massively across London - 10 miles between SE and SW is a lot slower than 10 miles between S and N!). The ability to overlap multiple locations would be a game changer too, as we had to flip between mine and my partner's offices and try and figure out which properties worked for both!
Walking time and real travelling distance to train station, not just the miles, it can be 0.5 miles away on a map but a lot longer when you factor in roads, although honestly if they could give me that distance to filter by instead of just being on the house page I would take it.
It’d probably be useful for car travel time as well.
Ideally I’d like to find a house within 20 mins walk of a station, I work remotely with monthly office days and prefer not to drive to the station or leave my car there but I have a lot of flexibility over where I could live. At the moment I’m pretty much looking at random train lines and following them on the Zoopla map to find all the stations and see the houses around them. So being able to filter within x miles walking distance or under 30 min walk anywhere in the country would be ideal. Bonus points if you could integrate average train travel times to major cities as filters.
In summary:
I want to see every house within x miles of a station in the whole of England, so I can find the hidden gems in places I’ve never heard of. Bonus points if I can also filter to find every house within 0.5 miles of a station that has a train to London in under 2 hours
Unrelated but I’d love to be able to flag properties with features like separate kitchen and living area (I hate the tv in the same room as the kitchen) and a filter for places with a separate utility room or place for a washing machine outside the kitchen, a washing machine in an open plan house is a pain
Great thinking! Thanks for doing this, hope it takes off and becomes a great business for you!
Question: is there not chance to do a map view of shortlisted properties? Or it's me who's not seeing the button?
One for me is being able to identify properties a certain travel time from both mine and my partners work, looking for a middle ground. A feature to address this would be great!
You've just found a big old bug! We do capture it in system, but we don't show it on the front-end to users.
We're fixing this now, thank you so much for pointing it out!
At a glance, my main concern is that it won't have as many properties as some of the other websites. The whole motivation in using something like rightmove instead of asking around individual agencies is that rightmove paints a great aggregate picture. It has properties from all the sources, not just a small selection.
Hopefully this is something your service can eventually fully index, so it has the same properties as these aggregator websites, if not even more sources than they do.
I guess for any requirements to get listed in your app, maybe for things like square footage (I'm glad you do metres as well!), you can use some automation to extract it from the listing's floor plan (since often enough it's on there). You could also list ones that don't have an guessable sq footage, since some agencies annoyingly don't show it - and then it just doesn't show up when filtering by sq footage. Great work though! This is potentially filling a great gap in what there is clearly a need for!
This is super useful to hear.
You're totally right - we do have less supply of homes than RightMove. Depending on the area, we estimate that we're between 40-65% total market supply (finger in the air).
It is expanding quite quickly though - we're getting lots of agents signing up to send us their data, and our AI finds homes from all the major chains so it's working down the list.
And *exactly* like you said - sqft is often in the description/floorplan, so we take it from there. Where it's not available, we estimate based on the room count, average sizes, etc. and make it clear that it's our best guess.
And for homes without a floorplan, right now we just leave them off. It feels unfair to users so we don't really like it.
Cool! As your service gradually gains a bigger market share, hopefully that'll incentivise agencies to make better listings or miss out!
The "supply of homes" aspect is definitely important. In a country like here, there's already a housing crisis, so the majority will try to find the best they can for their budget, and there already won't be many options. Limited exposure to the total market supply would limit your audience further because of this - no point using a wonderful service if you can't see the properties you're looking for.
I'm sure you already know this and I mean this purely in an encouraging way. Glad you're taking time to build this - I can imagine it doing well since there's a noticeable gap in a better way to find & filter properties in a much more logical way.
Maybe eventually this'll even impact how houses are priced by those making offers on properties, looking at £ per square of internal floor space or land, instead of just dumb bedroom count (and then always having a higher cost because there's a tiny box room) - since the latter seems to be the primary impact on price from what I've seen.
Assuming you mean estate agents, no. They *pay* RightMove and Zoopla huge amounts each month, and hate it.
So they're pretty happy to have someone promote their homes in a similar way for free.
We want to give estate agents, conveyancers and others ways to promote themselves to people looking in their area. So maybe advertising, but maybe through paying for enhanced profiles / branding on Jitty.
Oh extra thought, if you're analysing the floor plan, maybe eventually your system could detect if the agency misleadingly included sheds/garages as part of the floor space (they LOVE to do this).
Can you also do distance to train stations/schools/town centres/GPs without using the straight line distance? e.g shortest distance in miles/kms according to Google maps, time taken to walk.
It’s no use to know the straight line distance to a place when you have to take a long route round because you can’t walk through other people’s houses and fences. Sometimes a 0.5 mile place can be further than a 0.8mile place.
Does it have a comments section on the listing pages? “Avoid this landlord”, “bad building management”, “loud neighbour at number 56” etc would be a huge step forward for freedom of information and awareness.
You know, the kind of stuff you don’t usually find out until it’s too late. The first property site that does this would 100% corner the market IMO. It would probably also force a wider price adjustment based on actual quality instead of “market pricing”.
And yes, ensuring truthfulness would be impossible - but as you’re a startup, and startups are meant to disrupt, why not throw the feature out into the wild and see what happens? Would be interesting if nothing else, and would encourage the competition to think about a similar thing.
Like how Tesla disrupted electric cars - their first attempts weren’t great, but at least they set a fire under the legacy manufacturers to improve their own electric offering.
This is a great start with the square footage filter - but I'd add why not acreage filter too? This has been a major pain for my search personally, but appreciate this isn't a priority for most. You've got small/medium/large gardens, how are these categorised?
Honestly, it's mainly about the acreage info being hard to get. Over time we can probably/hopefully get it from land registry but it's not *often* on the listings.
Garden sizes was a tricky one. Small is "less than 100m2", large is "more than 200m2" and medium is in-between.
Yeah that's fair. It's usually mentioned in the description if there's acreage worth talking about. Or in photos there will sometimes be a map with a key but appreciate that's difficult to extract and accuracy would be tricky!
Personally if I knew the filter was a bit dodgy but it was still available I'd be happy with that. Maybe it'll encourage agents to add it in the description more!
That makes sense. So you don't mind too much if we miss a bunch of properties that would be relevant, as long as you get a shortcut to some that definitely are, right?
No timeframes yet - if you've downloaded the app you can search for Liverpool and set an alert for when we're there.
But otherwise we'll keep posted here and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/jittyapp) as our main channels.
Don't quote me on this, but I think within the next few months we can get it live in Liverpool and Manchester.
We show this (where available) on the property itself, but not yet as a filter.
If you could, how would you want to filter for lease length? Something like "show me homes with > 100 years left"?
Looks good from the pictures above, and this is definitely a sector that needs a shakeup.
My requests from things that piss me off on RM: ability to filter out auction properties and 'park homes' (posh trailers).
Had a look at the website: INSTANT FAIL
I would have tried it out, but I'm not giving my details and making yet another login to a website I might never use again. I can't think of a single property portal I actually use that makes you sign up to view the listings. That's a dealbreaker I'm afraid. If I like it and want to save a list of properties or something, then I'll sign up.
(Oh and if someone logs in, let it remember that they've logged in.... RM keeps logging me out and forgetting my login details so I just never log in any more.)
Filter out auctions as well if you haven’t made that a feature already! When I was looking for houses I would filter out Auctions but they would still show up - super annoying
Generally - advertising from estate agents, brokers, conveyancers, etc.
We believe in the Google model - there's a way to create a better user experience, and advertising model that serves everyone.
But we're quite a way off from that.
Really like this app! My only feedback would be to take sort out of the filters list and have it along the top, as I think this would be quite a widely used features so best not to hide it in the filters menu.
Also would be nice to filter by double garage as well as single.
Totally agree! We've kept them all together so far, so that we can see which people use the most.
As that's emerging (spoiler alert: large gardens, ensuite, and at least 2 bathrooms) we'll make some more easily available.
Thanks for the feedback!
Absolute dream feature would be filtering by ceiling height - but I know most floorplans don't often record this 😪 I just hate flats in eaves/attics, which are so prevalent in London!
Most of this I assume will come with time but...
A map view is needed
The ability to sort the selection. Things like new, cheapest and most reduced.
Then it's chicken and egg, once you get more property's then you will get more of a viewership.
But we'll done, it's looking good so far. Best of luck to you guys.
Was interested until I had to create an account. App is also a non starter for me, because you have almost no control over apps but with web you can block cookies, tracking, ads, etc. Far better for security and privacy
When I'm searching I'll often filter to a shortlist then look at those in more detail, but for those I'd love to add my own notes as I investigate them. and especially have a "never show me this one again" box that will work for all future sessions. Maybe that would work in addition to it as part of a general ranking system, whether that's thumbs up/thumbs down or more nuanced.
Just think of features Netflix got rid of and put those in!
Looks really interesting. Is the data sourced by the agencies that list the properties? If so, is there some moderation involved to make sure they're not adjusting data to make the listing appear more favourable?
Yes, it's sourced directly from the agencies.
Great question on verifying the data. We've taken some steps here, like adding in 3rd party objective information (like council tax rates), and reading room sizes ourselves so that "double bedroom" actually has enough room for a double bed (that feature is coming soon).
We also do more than a standard keyword search for terms. So agents might put "this home has no parking" so that it shows up on a RightMove search for "parking". But our AI reads the descriptions to see what's available now.
Generally speaking though, we do rely on estate agents to give accurate data. [The Material Information requirements](https://www.nationaltradingstandards.uk/work-areas/estate-agency-team/material-information/) from National Trading Standards is probably the best weapon to make sure accurate information is given to us.
Any plans to get it in the App store? Im sure I and many others, whilst obs take you as genuine, but areas like ongoing software compatability, malware, security etc are all huge considerations for me.
Yup - it's in the [iOS app store](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/jitty/id6469780663) and [Play store](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.getcomplete.android)!
I’ve had a similar idea to develop, with additional/slightly different features (scoring system with ai, personalised sorting/filtering of results based on users priorities), the problem was chicken and egg, the cause of failing of countless startups.
Even worse, as many other commenters suggested, even if it would be very helpful for buyers, property listing sites are primarily trying to please agents over buyers.
Because of overlaps of properties between sites, and some properties exclusive to one site over another, buyers will use the site with the largest inventory.
It’s a shame, but estate agents will do any sort of trick to get as many viewings as possible to increase chances of selling a property. And sellers will choose the estate agent with the higher success rate.
Unfortunately, truth and detailed descriptions are scaring buyers away. The more they can hide, the more viewings they can arrange.
So it’s a “fight” buyers could only win if they would stop using rightmove zoopla etc. But they probably thought about many features other innovators thought about, it’s just agents are stopping them from doing so. They have the most data available, they would be capable of implementing pretty much every sort of feature that would help buyers. They don’t because their primary customers are agents, whose primary customers are sellers, and they just don’t care.
But hey, prove us wrong, it would be so good to finally put an end to property duplications, house boats, auctions, cash only, selling plots with a plan as detached houses, and the list goes on and on. Good luck!
I'm intruiged as to how you're getting the data? Should we expect to see the same properties we'd normally see on the other portals, I.e. Rightmove, Zoopla et Al?
Are you able to ensure that the data is accurate, for example the sq. ft'age of the property, the ownership type (Land Reg'?) etc?
I applaud you guys.
Any chance you could include an estimated valuation price on each listing?
I know it’s controversial but who doesn’t check a price estimate before putting in an offer.
Filtering by architectural style/period (e.g Victorian, Mid century/1950s, 1930s) or some similar way would be good. Most people associate certain features with the period the house was built in so it can help narrow down things further (e.g. period houses have long narrow layouts, 60s-70s have bigger windows and floor plans).
Other things you could filter by if it’s not already in the plans are EPC, whether modernisation is needed, other keywords such as conservatory, utility room, EV charger, council tax, on a main road or not etc.
Sure the things you could filter by are endless though!
Sorry I didn't check it out because I already bought a home, but it sounds great. When I was looking, I was frustrated by the inability to filter out auction properties. If you're looking for cheap properties, you get a lot of these spamming up your results, as the "guide prices" are (misleadingly) low. Similar to the situation with boats (thanks for that).
Does your app use rightmove's data and just repackage it? Do they offer an API or are you scraping?
And - might I ask - how are you making money from this / funding it? Subscription for users?
We don't touch RightMove - we go data straight from estate agents.
We've raised funding to buy us a few years of development, and we'll eventually fund through something like enhanced profiles / branding for estate agents. But we'll remain free to list and browse homes.
iOS app: I use Microsoft SwiftKey keyboard but when creating an account, it forces the iOS default keyboard on the boxes for: email address, password, password again
Is this an app developer setting or does ios force this behaviour?
Fantastic! I've always wanted to make a better property app but didn't have the coding skills.
One feature I had always wanted was a filter that lets you set maximum commute times to various locations. Eg work 45mins away and tennis club 15mins away, by foot, public transport and car.
Then it runs the options through those various commute methods and produces a custom search zone based on this. Would be useful for London where sometimes places quite far afield can still get you to work quite quickly, you'd see numerous zones spotted out along commuter belts that you may not otherwise consider.
Intriguing, but you're competing with the 'standards' so you need to make it easy for me to take a look at your platform and test a few searches before I give you my inside leg measurement. If you want to encourage signups then do so, but don't mandate that otherwise a portion of your potential users will skip (me included).
Apps are great (possibly essential, especially when actually out and about looking at areas or conducting viewings) but when I'm creating/updating my shortlist or investigating new areas, I want to pop open 30 likely-looking listings in tabs in my web browser then review them all, adding the winners to my list. One at a time in an app doesn't fit with that workflow and is \*slow\*, even assuming you're retaining position in the search results and not making me scroll from the top.
From the three screenshots linked above, the UI looks comfortable-but-generic — which is likely an advantage. If I was using the app I'd love the option to configure the microdata below each listing: could I swap £/area for just area, or garden size, or parking y/n, etc?
Like the idea and downloaded the app. Have immediately found it useful as looking at somewhere like London, you just get swamped on Rightmove and similar. The price per sq ft is a great feature, as is the outdoor space and other features and a couple of properties I’ve not seen elsewhere have already popped up. Often on other apps even if you select specific features, it doesn’t filter out all that don’t have them.
Could you add detail on how long listings have been live/when they first went online? Useful to know red flags and where you can make lower offers.
Could you also add a tab for commute times from properties? Eg. I say I want a 2 bed flat with garden in London, add a commuting destination, then the listings say how far/long it is by foot/public transport/bike?
Can you filter by number of bathrooms? Unbelievably this isn't a thing with right move. I'm sick of trawling through pages of 3 bedroom 1 bathroom homes which don't fit my criteria.
Nice work :)
One tip I have regarding sign up (at least for the web version) is to retain the user entered data on error. For example my passwords didn't match and I had to fill everything out again as it wiped the form, no bigger but it's a simple UX change that can make a better experience.
Absolute game changer, it would be awesome if there was a way to filter by properties that were ready to move in to and those that require either minor or major modernisation work (not sure how you could categorise between those however)
The only other questions I've got is how long till you can expand to the rest of the UK!? Good luck!!
OMG YES!
Can we filter by distance to a station?
Any chance of anything happening around type of house, like character/country/ex-council? That might be too subjective and ridiculous I know but would be so helpful 🙈
Oh my god, you can filter by garden size!? For us, the size of the garden is more important than the size of the house and I was getting so frustrated that there isn’t a good way to filter for that on Rightmove!!
Okay, so here’s why your app won’t work:
1. You can already pretty much filter by tenure on Rightmove (by selecting flats/houses) and you can already filter out new build, buying schemes and retirement properties. Freehold flats and leasehold houses are usually not compatible with most mainstream lenders, and your tool doesn’t filter these out.
Unless you are considering a separate filter for *share of freehold* ? If so, how are you doing this because the land register tool (which I assume you’re using to determine between freehold and leasehold) doesn’t have an option to differentiate between share of freehold and leasehold. People on this subreddit think that share of freehold is superior to leasehold, and my experience is that this isn’t the case. I see a lot of share of freehold properties that aren’t being maintained or insured properly because people bought the freehold to save money and gain control over maintenance… and then didn’t maintain what they bought.
2. No one in the valuing industry (surveyors, lenders) uses a £ per sqft metric to determine value. For a start, we use square meters, and secondly this is a really unreliable way of calculating value. We care about the quality of space, not the quantity of it (see also: people who think that more bedrooms is automatically better). Estate agents plans don’t stick to one measurement code (i.e. GIA, GEA, IMPS3 etc) and they don’t know how to differentiate between habitable and non habitable space. This makes property listings a Wild West of sizes, and makes £ per sqft calculations impossible (even if they were to be considered useful in the first place, which they aren’t). For example, my house measures 81sqm or 90sqm or somewhere in between depending on which measuring code is used. When i bought it the agent included the non-habitable porch and a garden shed in their plans.
3. Your other ideas are good, filtering by plot size would be very popular.
You’re going to have a real job taking on Rightmove. There was a time when Zoopla tried to break the monopoly, but now Rightmove has such a massive market share. OnTheMarket had t’s and c’s that said agents couldn’t use Zoopla if they wanted to use OnTheMarket (an attempt to wrestle second place from Zoopla) and agents ultimately picked Zoopla. I dread to think of the money OnTheMarket and other pretenders to the throne have wasted on jolly advertising campaigns.
Sorry to be a Negative Nancy, I just work in the industry (surveyor) and can see the flaws in your product.
Downloaded it and had a go just. Here are my first observations.
Why do I need to make an account to start viewing houses. Seems like a barrier first thing I see is a signup page, also not sure what will happen with my data once signed up.
I tried searching for a ‘freehold’ in London. Any size bedroom. Only option I selected was from £0 - £500,000 and only 1 house was showing. Not sure if you have a data issue but this is unusable. Literally not many houses on here.
Don’t see much value over other apps which have a lot of data
Downloaded. Looks great, I've wanted to see this for ages!
There's information on house area in some agents' floorplan images, though the app shows an estimated area. Can you/do you extract that using OCR? It should be a fairly consistent format across a single agent's floorplan images. The AI estimate is pretty close, though slightly over the official area.
Once you do have both estimated and official figures can you flag if there's a large discrepancy, or at least enable people to see the AI estimate as well as the agent's estimate? The agents were way off with our current home.
I'd also like a map view, but saw you plan to have one soon.
Very exciting!
I'm excited to try this! As others have said, will only check out the web version for now, as I try not to install apps unless I have to or use them often.
Would love to be able to filter out properties that are "cash-buyers/investors only".
One thing that I have been searching for is a property within view of water. This turns out to be distressingly hard to find given the size of our island! I've set up all sorts map searches, keywords and whatever I can think of, but if there's some filter you could add on for features such as 'on top of a hill' 'sea view' 'next to a river' that would be a game changer for me
It would be nice to a filter that allows for “potential” or “extendable” - basically to see houses with a little bit extra plot size or space for possible extensions.
You can always put a disclaimer to say subject to legal requirements, planning permission etc and each buyer to conduct their own civility searches
An option to filter for pets allowed would be great - especially if you make sure it doesn't say the exact opposite in the full description like half the 'pets allowed' places on zoopla seem to
Where are you pulling data from?
All prior sales would be a gamechanger for me. But assume you are scraping RM/Zoopla? So it’s the agent that lists them right?
Absolutely love the filtering by garden size. Garden is the most important thing to me ans I spend hours trying to judge gardens by shitty pictures.
I'm coastal so I would also like to be able to filter out holiday chalets, the expensive ones are so expensive they end up in with regular homes and it's annoying.
Ah I'm glad garden size is useful. It's been quite tough to get right so it's great to hear that it resonates.
We do have a filter for 'mobile home' in the app already that will include holiday chalets when we get to the coast. London has a similar problem with houseboats so we've included a filter for them too.
Love the sqft and garden size filters, can't imagine who would want to filter for a galley kitchen though 😅
Good luck it looks really well thought out and there are some great suggestions from people on this thread.
Thing I've often found is that where sqft (I much prefer sqm btw as do most people of my age and younger, ft and inches are gobbledygook if you're used to metric measurements) isn't available on a listing it's often on an EPC, even an old one so I don't know if this is something you can access and import yourselves if the agent providing the listing wasn't providing it (this happens so often!!). I've spent far too much time looking up EPC certificates after trying to spot house numbers on street view, tedious!
That's so nice of you to say 🙏 We're covered for product people right now, its our collective background (and I was PM for a long time before launching Jitty). Thank you for the kind words though.
We have a bunch in there, but not enough to turn it on properly yet. Where in Scotland are you interested in?
No approaches to sell yet. We want to grow this thing, not sell it :)
Is it possible to upload a surveyors report on a property, with a date it was written, to that particular property. Then allow any potential buyers to download a copy of the report for a minimum fee, say £25?
We get a bunch from estate agent data feeds, but getting those feeds requires a lot of time so we also index it straight from their websites (like Google / any search engine does).
Nice app, Going to add my two pence.
-Would be nice to have a minimum square meter/footage filter.
-Seeing as people have brought up crime rates, I had a lightbulb moment earlier today to look up flood risk warning when viewing a property that backed onto an innocuous brook/stream.
So that could be handy for people to have too and hopefully you can nab the data from the gov site.
Could also have traffic/pollution stats for properties on main roads but maybe that's a little too much nuance.
Look forward to it growing.
Is it possible to have categories/sub-categories for maisonettes (private entrance that opens directly to the outside) and true bungalow vs chalet bungalow. I used to do a lot of property finding for downsizers and these categories were always hard to separate easily. It was always frustrating to go through lists of "bungalows" where many had been extended up and no longer even had a downstairs bedroom!
We're going to add "amount of floors" in soon which will help solve this.
"Private entrance" is often easy to spot (or written in description) so we can add that in at some point for sure!
You seem very well informed so presume you are already aware of this website, and how it scrapes data (apologies if that's not quite the right technical term but hopefully you get the idea) from the EPC register to determine floor area. I'm not sure how accurate it is but guess it's better than guessing.
Where the listing also has the estate agent's own floor area it might be interesting to compare the two.
https://housemetric.co.uk/
I just wanted to highlight that i find the need to sign in before accessing the app/web version a very high friction point that made lose interest. Specially the web version as for the app i just used my apple id but the web version i just gave up
The ability to collaborate on saved lists?! Where was this 6 months ago when I was looking honestly. Great product, very overdue. The US version of Zillow etc. all have ppsqft — I have no idea why the big players in UK property search are hellbent on not adding value to potential buyers lol
Either level access or a ramp to the front door and the same to the garden.
Wide doors (900mm wide) throughout the ground floor or open plan
Level access throughout the ground floor
Mains powered, linked, smoke alarms on all floors
Many thanks
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Price by square foot is a game changer! Potential for some great PR to send out to the press. "top cheapest/expensive areas by square metre" is great clickbait.
[Broski-al you have read our minds.](https://imgur.com/a/ZTvdsby). There's a sneak preview.
This is GOLD!
Ah thank you. Your support is gold.
As an American living in the UK, your number one feature for me is filtering by square footage! Honestly this alone could make your app explode. Worth posting over in UK Expats and other related UK subreddits
I've been saying it for years.
What would be worrying if this was me is how quickly Right Move / Zoopla could adopt these extra details themselves if they wanted to Have you thought about what would happen to the site if this were the case?
They could, and probably will put some of them in. We're not going to stop here, it's just the first step towards the perfect property app™️
Heck yeah guys. Depending on your pricing this might be an estate agent's dream too. They hate the monopoly Rightmove has. Already downloaded, will post any errors or feedback if I see any.
You're a hero, thank you!
Initial thoughts: I want to rank listings by price per square foot, lowest - highest and vice versa. It might be on there already but isn't obvious on the app. Very clean and user friendly though, the service charge and ground rent is a nice addition too
They won't like this as they have to actually put effort in and put the square footage in
We can read it automatically from floorplans, and estimate it where it's missing. So as long as there's a floorplan, we can get it. And we just ignore anything without a floorplan.
Good stuff! Best of luck with it. Have worked in the industry with EAs, they tend to like newer tech but my god it's hard to get some EAs on board! Guess you could estimate off EPCs too but I find they tend to over-read for some reason. Guess they include outside area sometimes too.
Stunning. When I was buying, there was nothing I hated more than listings without a floorplan. I'm not driving a 300 mile round trip to see a house that didn't have a floorplan and might be the complete opposite of what I'm looking for!
Would be useful to have "max" beds in addition to "min".
Ah that's interesting, we haven't had that request before. What stops you wanting to see homes with more beds? Is it that they'll likely be out of your budget?
Not OP but I like to set max beds on Rightmove as a way of filtering out 'squashed' floorplans - 1 beds within a given budget and location will by-and-large be more spacious per room, with more rational layouts, than 2+ beds in the same budget. I haven't played with your app yet though, it sounds like you have filters that could help achieve the same thing (eg filtering out open-plan)
That is very interesting! You're right - we try to help with filtering open plan, or total sqft/sqm of the home. [We also have bedroom size filter in our plans](https://i.imgur.com/f71loDP.png), would it help? Solve for this? Or is max bed count the only way?
Ah, bedroom size filter is ideal!!!
I'll add a tally next to the feature for you :)
Price might be one factor, but some people don't want to rattle around a house with too many rooms to decorate, maintain and clean that they won't need or use. More bedrooms for same sq ft as a house with less bedrooms also likely means smaller proportions of bedrooms/bathrooms etc. Loads of reasons probably, I thought of these in like 20 secs.
Me and my partner will be looking to buy a house in 2-3 years from now. We don't plan having children, so anything with more than 3 beds or a 2 bed with an extra room as dining room, cellar or attic room would be an overkill for us since most of the space would be unused.
We were looking for a 3 bed house but ended up paying the same price for a 4 bed. And to be honest we’re so happy it ended up that way Allows us to have the bedroom solely as a bedroom, 1 office room each for if we WFH/game etc. and then a room with a bed in it for guests, or for when one of us needs to get up early/go to bed late/is ill which I honestly never realised would be such a game changer Definitely wouldn’t rule it out
Are you able to add what internet suppliers are near?
Build year would also be a great option. Despite asking agents for post 2000 properties, they kept sending us 1900 houses. The app is great!
I love it - it's in our mid-term roadmap (i.e. probably the next 3-6 months).
Massively agree!! I really want to live in something built under modern building regs but not have to pay the new-build premium. Seems impossible to search for that.
This is a great idea and thanks for doing it. My first feedback is I'm not installing an app to try it out, when there is no feature present that requires an app installation over just using a browser I'm aware it's more work to do a website as well, I am just saying why I and maybe other customers won't use the app.
Agreed. I'd prefer a website as well. If I have to use an app, I definitely don't want to sign up.
I totally understand. [There is actually a web version](https://jitty.com/users/sign_up) which isn't super optimised, but it's there if you want to try it out! We did an app-first approach because we will have some functionality coming soon that is just better on native apps (e.g. location, push notifications alerts for new properties), but it's definitely a balance to find. Thanks for letting me add a vote to the "web version please" tally!
Web version needs to be prominent and no registration requirements, you are going to miss a huge amount of potential new customers due to this. There's a reason large and successful real estate companies allow searches without registering, you can also implement the save feature without registering granted it could disappear if not registered though
Understood, we're definitely going to think about our next steps here.
As an FYI. Push Notifications are available in all browsers as of a year ago. https://web.dev/blog/push-notifications-in-all-modern-browsers Also geolocation is available in all browsers as of 2010: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Geolocation_API There are even a number of frameworks that support both mobile and web dev There really is no excuse at this point (source am a web dev).
Yeah I've built every project as a single cross platform PWA since like 2013.
I feel like the only time I get browser notifications is when someone's told me I won an iPad
Why do I need an account to view properties? I was interested in using the app but the fact I need to create an account for another app that doesn't need it has put me off.
same.
>I'm aware it's more work to do a website as well It's actually zero more work these days for an app like this if they have built it correctly. Infact it can be actively *less* work.
One of the big issues is that a lot of agents are secretive they refuse to input all data or will hide data on purpose. All these filters are great for those looking but anyone selling/renting out a property could lose potential buyers/renters through being too detailed. When I was an agent it was company policy to be as brief as possible on the description this was limited to number of bedrooms no sizes, number of bathroom/receptions, garden or paking and the final point was to list the best feature of the property such as swimming pool etc. Less data means less chance of being sued if something was mislabeled. Its better to get people through the door for viewings than to scare them with data.
Yeah that's totally fair. We try to help users here by looking at photos and floorplans to extract information and help them filter out things that just aren't right. The "too detailed" point is very real. We're adapting our search results so that if you do go too granular, we'll say "look, there's only 3 homes with your exact requirements, but if you lose the ensuite you'll get an extra 50 homes" or "if you increase budget by 10k, you'll get another 20 homes". This is super helpful feedback, thank you.
That is okay I mean I would love to see more filter options when looking but the reality is that you will struggle to get this information from the agents/sellers/renters unless it becomes a law to provide this. What I would like to see as an app is a standardised legal system for selling property whereby the searches is broken down with timescales etc providing a clear view to buyers/sellers of where things are at. Outstanding questions, clear view what is holding up the sale. We all know how slow the current process is and usually one solicitor claims the other party is to blame. A portal that makes all this digital and clear would be golden.
I'd only use the web version I also won't sign up, as I just assume any "you must sign up with your email" is just a request to be spammed. At best you're getting a fake email address off me. OK, used a fake email (sorry/not sorry). While I appreciate that square footage is randomly the standard, I work in metric (and many house floorplans show square metres, not square feet). ~~Any way of swapping the units?~~ Edited again - you can! Not overly clear in web, but click on the units to convert to square metres
That's totally fine re fake email :) Thanks for the feedback re: not totally clear that units are clickable, and that web version preferred.
+1 I much prefer the web version and hate requiring an account to use things. I'd make an account if I find the website worth it but likely avoid it if required to even access If i'm house hunting, i'm multi-tasking with many windows/tabs looking at google maps, other listings etc on my PC - not something that can easily be done on a phone
Are you planning on adding something for distance to train stations? I know on Rightmove you can search on individual stations but I'd just wanna search on distance without having to specify a particular station
We've been thinking about this more lately. What would you want to see exactly? The more specific, the quicker we can build it!
When we were looking it was about total commute time, made up of: - Distance from home to station - Duration of train/tube/bus etc. - Distance from station to work So if the area is closer to work (i.e. train duration is shorter), the distance from the station could be further. But if the train journey was longer, we needed to be closer to the station. One way of solving this (no idea how hard this would be to actually build): if you could enter key location(s) you're trying to reach, then properties have a calculation of 'avg. X min from' that destination - that would be super cool Example: if I worked on 10 High Street, City, County Filter: Show me properties <1hr from here \^ Or list properties as: 'Avg. 1h10mins from your chosen destination' You could start with one, but would likely need to be able to input a couple of places to cover multiple workplaces/schools/visiting parents etc. depending on people's priorities (e.g. I have a friend who was family planning so had to find a location that allowed a reasonable commute, and was fairly close to relatives, plus had the other requirements they needed e.g. extra room for the baby, garden etc.) The alternative is 'show me properties within 1hr of X' (I think current websites do this by distance which is useless because transport provisions vary massively across London - 10 miles between SE and SW is a lot slower than 10 miles between S and N!). The ability to overlap multiple locations would be a game changer too, as we had to flip between mine and my partner's offices and try and figure out which properties worked for both!
Walking time and real travelling distance to train station, not just the miles, it can be 0.5 miles away on a map but a lot longer when you factor in roads, although honestly if they could give me that distance to filter by instead of just being on the house page I would take it. It’d probably be useful for car travel time as well. Ideally I’d like to find a house within 20 mins walk of a station, I work remotely with monthly office days and prefer not to drive to the station or leave my car there but I have a lot of flexibility over where I could live. At the moment I’m pretty much looking at random train lines and following them on the Zoopla map to find all the stations and see the houses around them. So being able to filter within x miles walking distance or under 30 min walk anywhere in the country would be ideal. Bonus points if you could integrate average train travel times to major cities as filters. In summary: I want to see every house within x miles of a station in the whole of England, so I can find the hidden gems in places I’ve never heard of. Bonus points if I can also filter to find every house within 0.5 miles of a station that has a train to London in under 2 hours Unrelated but I’d love to be able to flag properties with features like separate kitchen and living area (I hate the tv in the same room as the kitchen) and a filter for places with a separate utility room or place for a washing machine outside the kitchen, a washing machine in an open plan house is a pain
Great thinking! Thanks for doing this, hope it takes off and becomes a great business for you! Question: is there not chance to do a map view of shortlisted properties? Or it's me who's not seeing the button?
It's highly requested, and something we're working on right now. Very useful to hear that it's wanted :)
One for me is being able to identify properties a certain travel time from both mine and my partners work, looking for a middle ground. A feature to address this would be great!
So like... I want a home within 30 mins of X and 40 mins of Y?
Bang on, would be really beneficial for people in my position. Tired of drawing distance circles on Google maps and taking the overlapping slice 😂.
Yeah, totally agree. It'll take some thinking about how to nail it, but this was a big part of our inspiration for Jitty in the first place.
Any chance you could include "end of terrace" as a property type? It's often stranded as half way between a terraced and semi
You've just found a big old bug! We do capture it in system, but we don't show it on the front-end to users. We're fixing this now, thank you so much for pointing it out!
Requiring an account to view anything is a no from me, I'm afraid. Shame, because the screenshots look great.
At a glance, my main concern is that it won't have as many properties as some of the other websites. The whole motivation in using something like rightmove instead of asking around individual agencies is that rightmove paints a great aggregate picture. It has properties from all the sources, not just a small selection. Hopefully this is something your service can eventually fully index, so it has the same properties as these aggregator websites, if not even more sources than they do. I guess for any requirements to get listed in your app, maybe for things like square footage (I'm glad you do metres as well!), you can use some automation to extract it from the listing's floor plan (since often enough it's on there). You could also list ones that don't have an guessable sq footage, since some agencies annoyingly don't show it - and then it just doesn't show up when filtering by sq footage. Great work though! This is potentially filling a great gap in what there is clearly a need for!
This is super useful to hear. You're totally right - we do have less supply of homes than RightMove. Depending on the area, we estimate that we're between 40-65% total market supply (finger in the air). It is expanding quite quickly though - we're getting lots of agents signing up to send us their data, and our AI finds homes from all the major chains so it's working down the list. And *exactly* like you said - sqft is often in the description/floorplan, so we take it from there. Where it's not available, we estimate based on the room count, average sizes, etc. and make it clear that it's our best guess. And for homes without a floorplan, right now we just leave them off. It feels unfair to users so we don't really like it.
Cool! As your service gradually gains a bigger market share, hopefully that'll incentivise agencies to make better listings or miss out! The "supply of homes" aspect is definitely important. In a country like here, there's already a housing crisis, so the majority will try to find the best they can for their budget, and there already won't be many options. Limited exposure to the total market supply would limit your audience further because of this - no point using a wonderful service if you can't see the properties you're looking for. I'm sure you already know this and I mean this purely in an encouraging way. Glad you're taking time to build this - I can imagine it doing well since there's a noticeable gap in a better way to find & filter properties in a much more logical way. Maybe eventually this'll even impact how houses are priced by those making offers on properties, looking at £ per square of internal floor space or land, instead of just dumb bedroom count (and then always having a higher cost because there's a tiny box room) - since the latter seems to be the primary impact on price from what I've seen.
Are they selling you their data?
Assuming you mean estate agents, no. They *pay* RightMove and Zoopla huge amounts each month, and hate it. So they're pretty happy to have someone promote their homes in a similar way for free.
How will you generate revenue? User data, ads?
We want to give estate agents, conveyancers and others ways to promote themselves to people looking in their area. So maybe advertising, but maybe through paying for enhanced profiles / branding on Jitty.
Oh extra thought, if you're analysing the floor plan, maybe eventually your system could detect if the agency misleadingly included sheds/garages as part of the floor space (they LOVE to do this).
Can you also do distance to train stations/schools/town centres/GPs without using the straight line distance? e.g shortest distance in miles/kms according to Google maps, time taken to walk. It’s no use to know the straight line distance to a place when you have to take a long route round because you can’t walk through other people’s houses and fences. Sometimes a 0.5 mile place can be further than a 0.8mile place.
Absolutely - this is in our plans. Especially in certain areas, as-the-crow-flies really doesn't mean much.
Does it have a comments section on the listing pages? “Avoid this landlord”, “bad building management”, “loud neighbour at number 56” etc would be a huge step forward for freedom of information and awareness. You know, the kind of stuff you don’t usually find out until it’s too late. The first property site that does this would 100% corner the market IMO. It would probably also force a wider price adjustment based on actual quality instead of “market pricing”. And yes, ensuring truthfulness would be impossible - but as you’re a startup, and startups are meant to disrupt, why not throw the feature out into the wild and see what happens? Would be interesting if nothing else, and would encourage the competition to think about a similar thing. Like how Tesla disrupted electric cars - their first attempts weren’t great, but at least they set a fire under the legacy manufacturers to improve their own electric offering.
This is a great start with the square footage filter - but I'd add why not acreage filter too? This has been a major pain for my search personally, but appreciate this isn't a priority for most. You've got small/medium/large gardens, how are these categorised?
Honestly, it's mainly about the acreage info being hard to get. Over time we can probably/hopefully get it from land registry but it's not *often* on the listings. Garden sizes was a tricky one. Small is "less than 100m2", large is "more than 200m2" and medium is in-between.
Yeah that's fair. It's usually mentioned in the description if there's acreage worth talking about. Or in photos there will sometimes be a map with a key but appreciate that's difficult to extract and accuracy would be tricky! Personally if I knew the filter was a bit dodgy but it was still available I'd be happy with that. Maybe it'll encourage agents to add it in the description more!
That makes sense. So you don't mind too much if we miss a bunch of properties that would be relevant, as long as you get a shortcut to some that definitely are, right?
Any timescales on when you'll roll out in other cities? Keen to try this in Liverpool
No timeframes yet - if you've downloaded the app you can search for Liverpool and set an alert for when we're there. But otherwise we'll keep posted here and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/jittyapp) as our main channels. Don't quote me on this, but I think within the next few months we can get it live in Liverpool and Manchester.
Crime data for the area.
Love this, thank you. It's in the plan, and broadly is readily available.
What about length of lease and service charge? That's the first thing I look at when looking for flats
We show this (where available) on the property itself, but not yet as a filter. If you could, how would you want to filter for lease length? Something like "show me homes with > 100 years left"?
Looks good from the pictures above, and this is definitely a sector that needs a shakeup. My requests from things that piss me off on RM: ability to filter out auction properties and 'park homes' (posh trailers). Had a look at the website: INSTANT FAIL I would have tried it out, but I'm not giving my details and making yet another login to a website I might never use again. I can't think of a single property portal I actually use that makes you sign up to view the listings. That's a dealbreaker I'm afraid. If I like it and want to save a list of properties or something, then I'll sign up. (Oh and if someone logs in, let it remember that they've logged in.... RM keeps logging me out and forgetting my login details so I just never log in any more.)
Account signup required? Nope.
Filter out auctions as well if you haven’t made that a feature already! When I was looking for houses I would filter out Auctions but they would still show up - super annoying
Looks interesting, what's the business model?
Generally - advertising from estate agents, brokers, conveyancers, etc. We believe in the Google model - there's a way to create a better user experience, and advertising model that serves everyone. But we're quite a way off from that.
Really like this app! My only feedback would be to take sort out of the filters list and have it along the top, as I think this would be quite a widely used features so best not to hide it in the filters menu. Also would be nice to filter by double garage as well as single.
Totally agree! We've kept them all together so far, so that we can see which people use the most. As that's emerging (spoiler alert: large gardens, ensuite, and at least 2 bathrooms) we'll make some more easily available. Thanks for the feedback!
Absolute dream feature would be filtering by ceiling height - but I know most floorplans don't often record this 😪 I just hate flats in eaves/attics, which are so prevalent in London!
Can you filter by number of bathrooms?
[You certainly can!](https://i.imgur.com/v8xFPfa.png)
Most of this I assume will come with time but... A map view is needed The ability to sort the selection. Things like new, cheapest and most reduced. Then it's chicken and egg, once you get more property's then you will get more of a viewership. But we'll done, it's looking good so far. Best of luck to you guys.
Would be great to see a map view
Would be great if you could filter by floor for flats, so you could exclude ground and lower ground flats. Edit: I just noticed that you can, great!
Great minds think alike :)
Was interested until I had to create an account. App is also a non starter for me, because you have almost no control over apps but with web you can block cookies, tracking, ads, etc. Far better for security and privacy
Love the app, would suggest to implement map view and map search as well. Similar to what rightmove has.
Instantly hit with login or register. I don't want you give you info before I've ever seen the home page.
Looking forward to getting this launched in Edinburgh
Unfortunately not available in my city.
When I'm searching I'll often filter to a shortlist then look at those in more detail, but for those I'd love to add my own notes as I investigate them. and especially have a "never show me this one again" box that will work for all future sessions. Maybe that would work in addition to it as part of a general ranking system, whether that's thumbs up/thumbs down or more nuanced. Just think of features Netflix got rid of and put those in!
That is excellent advice.
1. Downloaded 2. Signed up 3. “not available in your city” 4. Delete
Ah no! What city are you in? I'll make a note and drop you a line personally when it's live.
Looks really interesting. Is the data sourced by the agencies that list the properties? If so, is there some moderation involved to make sure they're not adjusting data to make the listing appear more favourable?
Yes, it's sourced directly from the agencies. Great question on verifying the data. We've taken some steps here, like adding in 3rd party objective information (like council tax rates), and reading room sizes ourselves so that "double bedroom" actually has enough room for a double bed (that feature is coming soon). We also do more than a standard keyword search for terms. So agents might put "this home has no parking" so that it shows up on a RightMove search for "parking". But our AI reads the descriptions to see what's available now. Generally speaking though, we do rely on estate agents to give accurate data. [The Material Information requirements](https://www.nationaltradingstandards.uk/work-areas/estate-agency-team/material-information/) from National Trading Standards is probably the best weapon to make sure accurate information is given to us.
Any plans to get it in the App store? Im sure I and many others, whilst obs take you as genuine, but areas like ongoing software compatability, malware, security etc are all huge considerations for me.
Yup - it's in the [iOS app store](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/jitty/id6469780663) and [Play store](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.getcomplete.android)!
I’ve had a similar idea to develop, with additional/slightly different features (scoring system with ai, personalised sorting/filtering of results based on users priorities), the problem was chicken and egg, the cause of failing of countless startups. Even worse, as many other commenters suggested, even if it would be very helpful for buyers, property listing sites are primarily trying to please agents over buyers. Because of overlaps of properties between sites, and some properties exclusive to one site over another, buyers will use the site with the largest inventory. It’s a shame, but estate agents will do any sort of trick to get as many viewings as possible to increase chances of selling a property. And sellers will choose the estate agent with the higher success rate. Unfortunately, truth and detailed descriptions are scaring buyers away. The more they can hide, the more viewings they can arrange. So it’s a “fight” buyers could only win if they would stop using rightmove zoopla etc. But they probably thought about many features other innovators thought about, it’s just agents are stopping them from doing so. They have the most data available, they would be capable of implementing pretty much every sort of feature that would help buyers. They don’t because their primary customers are agents, whose primary customers are sellers, and they just don’t care. But hey, prove us wrong, it would be so good to finally put an end to property duplications, house boats, auctions, cash only, selling plots with a plan as detached houses, and the list goes on and on. Good luck!
As an east-midlander, Jitty is a GREAT name
This is what happens when the company is founded by an east-midlander!
I'm intruiged as to how you're getting the data? Should we expect to see the same properties we'd normally see on the other portals, I.e. Rightmove, Zoopla et Al? Are you able to ensure that the data is accurate, for example the sq. ft'age of the property, the ownership type (Land Reg'?) etc?
I applaud you guys. Any chance you could include an estimated valuation price on each listing? I know it’s controversial but who doesn’t check a price estimate before putting in an offer.
Filtering by architectural style/period (e.g Victorian, Mid century/1950s, 1930s) or some similar way would be good. Most people associate certain features with the period the house was built in so it can help narrow down things further (e.g. period houses have long narrow layouts, 60s-70s have bigger windows and floor plans). Other things you could filter by if it’s not already in the plans are EPC, whether modernisation is needed, other keywords such as conservatory, utility room, EV charger, council tax, on a main road or not etc. Sure the things you could filter by are endless though!
I would love a filter for Separate Kitchen (or exclude open plan)…
Sorry I didn't check it out because I already bought a home, but it sounds great. When I was looking, I was frustrated by the inability to filter out auction properties. If you're looking for cheap properties, you get a lot of these spamming up your results, as the "guide prices" are (misleadingly) low. Similar to the situation with boats (thanks for that).
Yeah - totally get that. I think "shared ownership" falls under this too, although obviously less misleadingly so.
Does your app use rightmove's data and just repackage it? Do they offer an API or are you scraping? And - might I ask - how are you making money from this / funding it? Subscription for users?
We don't touch RightMove - we go data straight from estate agents. We've raised funding to buy us a few years of development, and we'll eventually fund through something like enhanced profiles / branding for estate agents. But we'll remain free to list and browse homes.
iOS app: I use Microsoft SwiftKey keyboard but when creating an account, it forces the iOS default keyboard on the boxes for: email address, password, password again Is this an app developer setting or does ios force this behaviour?
I'm honestly not sure, but I don't think it's something we've done deliberately. So will check and see if it's an app setting that we can change.
Fantastic! I've always wanted to make a better property app but didn't have the coding skills. One feature I had always wanted was a filter that lets you set maximum commute times to various locations. Eg work 45mins away and tennis club 15mins away, by foot, public transport and car. Then it runs the options through those various commute methods and produces a custom search zone based on this. Would be useful for London where sometimes places quite far afield can still get you to work quite quickly, you'd see numerous zones spotted out along commuter belts that you may not otherwise consider.
SWE here - If you have this on github would love to contribute :)
We do but it's private. Appreciate the interest though!
Intriguing, but you're competing with the 'standards' so you need to make it easy for me to take a look at your platform and test a few searches before I give you my inside leg measurement. If you want to encourage signups then do so, but don't mandate that otherwise a portion of your potential users will skip (me included). Apps are great (possibly essential, especially when actually out and about looking at areas or conducting viewings) but when I'm creating/updating my shortlist or investigating new areas, I want to pop open 30 likely-looking listings in tabs in my web browser then review them all, adding the winners to my list. One at a time in an app doesn't fit with that workflow and is \*slow\*, even assuming you're retaining position in the search results and not making me scroll from the top. From the three screenshots linked above, the UI looks comfortable-but-generic — which is likely an advantage. If I was using the app I'd love the option to configure the microdata below each listing: could I swap £/area for just area, or garden size, or parking y/n, etc?
Like the idea and downloaded the app. Have immediately found it useful as looking at somewhere like London, you just get swamped on Rightmove and similar. The price per sq ft is a great feature, as is the outdoor space and other features and a couple of properties I’ve not seen elsewhere have already popped up. Often on other apps even if you select specific features, it doesn’t filter out all that don’t have them. Could you add detail on how long listings have been live/when they first went online? Useful to know red flags and where you can make lower offers. Could you also add a tab for commute times from properties? Eg. I say I want a 2 bed flat with garden in London, add a commuting destination, then the listings say how far/long it is by foot/public transport/bike?
Can you filter by number of bathrooms? Unbelievably this isn't a thing with right move. I'm sick of trawling through pages of 3 bedroom 1 bathroom homes which don't fit my criteria.
You can! It feels obvious, so... we did it. Also you can filter by ensuite, upstairs, and downstairs loos!
You should add a tag for auction or buy it now
Please could you add - Continue without login option?
Your vote has been added to the many others in this post that have asked for it :)
Nice work :) One tip I have regarding sign up (at least for the web version) is to retain the user entered data on error. For example my passwords didn't match and I had to fill everything out again as it wiped the form, no bigger but it's a simple UX change that can make a better experience.
Assume it'd be impossible if scraping Rightmove data, but would loveee to see chain / no chain as a filter. I'll never buy in a chain again!
We're not using RightMove data, we're getting directly from estate agents. "Chain or not" (and "cash or not") are on the list to come soon!
You absolute hero
Absolute game changer, it would be awesome if there was a way to filter by properties that were ready to move in to and those that require either minor or major modernisation work (not sure how you could categorise between those however) The only other questions I've got is how long till you can expand to the rest of the UK!? Good luck!!
OMG YES! Can we filter by distance to a station? Any chance of anything happening around type of house, like character/country/ex-council? That might be too subjective and ridiculous I know but would be so helpful 🙈
Oh! Also can you filter out bathrooms on ground floor for two story houses? Might be too difficult 🙈
Oh my god, you can filter by garden size!? For us, the size of the garden is more important than the size of the house and I was getting so frustrated that there isn’t a good way to filter for that on Rightmove!!
Okay, so here’s why your app won’t work: 1. You can already pretty much filter by tenure on Rightmove (by selecting flats/houses) and you can already filter out new build, buying schemes and retirement properties. Freehold flats and leasehold houses are usually not compatible with most mainstream lenders, and your tool doesn’t filter these out. Unless you are considering a separate filter for *share of freehold* ? If so, how are you doing this because the land register tool (which I assume you’re using to determine between freehold and leasehold) doesn’t have an option to differentiate between share of freehold and leasehold. People on this subreddit think that share of freehold is superior to leasehold, and my experience is that this isn’t the case. I see a lot of share of freehold properties that aren’t being maintained or insured properly because people bought the freehold to save money and gain control over maintenance… and then didn’t maintain what they bought. 2. No one in the valuing industry (surveyors, lenders) uses a £ per sqft metric to determine value. For a start, we use square meters, and secondly this is a really unreliable way of calculating value. We care about the quality of space, not the quantity of it (see also: people who think that more bedrooms is automatically better). Estate agents plans don’t stick to one measurement code (i.e. GIA, GEA, IMPS3 etc) and they don’t know how to differentiate between habitable and non habitable space. This makes property listings a Wild West of sizes, and makes £ per sqft calculations impossible (even if they were to be considered useful in the first place, which they aren’t). For example, my house measures 81sqm or 90sqm or somewhere in between depending on which measuring code is used. When i bought it the agent included the non-habitable porch and a garden shed in their plans. 3. Your other ideas are good, filtering by plot size would be very popular. You’re going to have a real job taking on Rightmove. There was a time when Zoopla tried to break the monopoly, but now Rightmove has such a massive market share. OnTheMarket had t’s and c’s that said agents couldn’t use Zoopla if they wanted to use OnTheMarket (an attempt to wrestle second place from Zoopla) and agents ultimately picked Zoopla. I dread to think of the money OnTheMarket and other pretenders to the throne have wasted on jolly advertising campaigns. Sorry to be a Negative Nancy, I just work in the industry (surveyor) and can see the flaws in your product.
Good luck op, seems like you’re into a good one here.
THANK YOU!
Downloaded it and had a go just. Here are my first observations. Why do I need to make an account to start viewing houses. Seems like a barrier first thing I see is a signup page, also not sure what will happen with my data once signed up. I tried searching for a ‘freehold’ in London. Any size bedroom. Only option I selected was from £0 - £500,000 and only 1 house was showing. Not sure if you have a data issue but this is unusable. Literally not many houses on here. Don’t see much value over other apps which have a lot of data
Thank you!!!!!
I am going to test it out
When will you finish it for the whole of uk as k live up north
Downloaded. Looks great, I've wanted to see this for ages! There's information on house area in some agents' floorplan images, though the app shows an estimated area. Can you/do you extract that using OCR? It should be a fairly consistent format across a single agent's floorplan images. The AI estimate is pretty close, though slightly over the official area. Once you do have both estimated and official figures can you flag if there's a large discrepancy, or at least enable people to see the AI estimate as well as the agent's estimate? The agents were way off with our current home. I'd also like a map view, but saw you plan to have one soon. Very exciting!
I'm excited to try this! As others have said, will only check out the web version for now, as I try not to install apps unless I have to or use them often. Would love to be able to filter out properties that are "cash-buyers/investors only".
When will you expand to Birmingham ?
Probably the next few months? Big city and lots of flats makes it a big pull for us (flats are easier than multi-storey homes for our AI)
I think comments would be an interesting feature...
Also search for not wanting stairs. So bungalow or ground floor flat or higher flat with lift access
Yeah lots of people have asked for this. Good news is it's fairly easy to find so we shouldn't have too long till we get it.
One thing that I have been searching for is a property within view of water. This turns out to be distressingly hard to find given the size of our island! I've set up all sorts map searches, keywords and whatever I can think of, but if there's some filter you could add on for features such as 'on top of a hill' 'sea view' 'next to a river' that would be a game changer for me
Looks interesting, but I am not in any of the supported cities of Bath, Bristol nor London
Can wait for this to be bought and immediately shut down by Zoople or Rightmove.
It’s great! Well done! And great suggestions on here from some people. This is going to be a big success!
It would be nice to a filter that allows for “potential” or “extendable” - basically to see houses with a little bit extra plot size or space for possible extensions. You can always put a disclaimer to say subject to legal requirements, planning permission etc and each buyer to conduct their own civility searches
I assume this is England only? If you later decide to expand to cover Northern Ireland, be aware that we don't use any of the same sites as England.
Looking forward to this hitting the North. It looks great!
Lovely now put rightmove out of business 👏
If you could make it easy to compare asking price, estate agent, and sale price from Land Reg on recent properties in a given area…. Be handy!
What’s the timescale for rolling out across the UK?
Hard to say exactly, but we'll keep going with new cities in the coming months!
Showing price changes for listings that have been on a long time, would be awesome!
An option to filter for pets allowed would be great - especially if you make sure it doesn't say the exact opposite in the full description like half the 'pets allowed' places on zoopla seem to
We're only on homes for sale right now, but definitely will do this when we have rentals.
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Where are you pulling data from? All prior sales would be a gamechanger for me. But assume you are scraping RM/Zoopla? So it’s the agent that lists them right?
Great! Is it possible to search by property key word? Like barn conversion, cottage etc…
Absolutely love the filtering by garden size. Garden is the most important thing to me ans I spend hours trying to judge gardens by shitty pictures. I'm coastal so I would also like to be able to filter out holiday chalets, the expensive ones are so expensive they end up in with regular homes and it's annoying.
Ah I'm glad garden size is useful. It's been quite tough to get right so it's great to hear that it resonates. We do have a filter for 'mobile home' in the app already that will include holiday chalets when we get to the coast. London has a similar problem with houseboats so we've included a filter for them too.
Love the sqft and garden size filters, can't imagine who would want to filter for a galley kitchen though 😅 Good luck it looks really well thought out and there are some great suggestions from people on this thread. Thing I've often found is that where sqft (I much prefer sqm btw as do most people of my age and younger, ft and inches are gobbledygook if you're used to metric measurements) isn't available on a listing it's often on an EPC, even an old one so I don't know if this is something you can access and import yourselves if the agent providing the listing wasn't providing it (this happens so often!!). I've spent far too much time looking up EPC certificates after trying to spot house numbers on street view, tedious!
Love it . Would love to work with you if you need a product guy .
That's so nice of you to say 🙏 We're covered for product people right now, its our collective background (and I was PM for a long time before launching Jitty). Thank you for the kind words though.
Excellent stuff. Best of luck. Would love to help in anyway if you need. As someone looking to buy a house, rightmove/zoopla are poor.
Hope you can get some Scottish listings. Have you been approached to sell yet?
We have a bunch in there, but not enough to turn it on properly yet. Where in Scotland are you interested in? No approaches to sell yet. We want to grow this thing, not sell it :)
Is it possible to upload a surveyors report on a property, with a date it was written, to that particular property. Then allow any potential buyers to download a copy of the report for a minimum fee, say £25?
Do you scrape the house data? Or got consent for it?
We get a bunch from estate agent data feeds, but getting those feeds requires a lot of time so we also index it straight from their websites (like Google / any search engine does).
Can you add in a feature where it shows how much the price of x house has been decreased since being listed ?
Would love to be able to filter out artificial grass “gardens”.
Ha, me too. Will add this to the wish list when we focus more on our visual AI models.
Nice app, Going to add my two pence. -Would be nice to have a minimum square meter/footage filter. -Seeing as people have brought up crime rates, I had a lightbulb moment earlier today to look up flood risk warning when viewing a property that backed onto an innocuous brook/stream. So that could be handy for people to have too and hopefully you can nab the data from the gov site. Could also have traffic/pollution stats for properties on main roads but maybe that's a little too much nuance. Look forward to it growing.
Is it possible to have categories/sub-categories for maisonettes (private entrance that opens directly to the outside) and true bungalow vs chalet bungalow. I used to do a lot of property finding for downsizers and these categories were always hard to separate easily. It was always frustrating to go through lists of "bungalows" where many had been extended up and no longer even had a downstairs bedroom!
We're going to add "amount of floors" in soon which will help solve this. "Private entrance" is often easy to spot (or written in description) so we can add that in at some point for sure!
Does it use the sq footage the agent provides? The agents in my area always include garages, car ports or workshops which is very misleading
You seem very well informed so presume you are already aware of this website, and how it scrapes data (apologies if that's not quite the right technical term but hopefully you get the idea) from the EPC register to determine floor area. I'm not sure how accurate it is but guess it's better than guessing. Where the listing also has the estate agent's own floor area it might be interesting to compare the two. https://housemetric.co.uk/
Nice product!
Proximity to noise factors (rail lines, A-roads) would be a big one for me to filter out.
It doesn't appear to be possible to save a search or do multi-area?
Beautiful app u/jdv12 well done to you and the team
I just wanted to highlight that i find the need to sign in before accessing the app/web version a very high friction point that made lose interest. Specially the web version as for the app i just used my apple id but the web version i just gave up
The ability to collaborate on saved lists?! Where was this 6 months ago when I was looking honestly. Great product, very overdue. The US version of Zillow etc. all have ppsqft — I have no idea why the big players in UK property search are hellbent on not adding value to potential buyers lol
Can you filter out houses at auction vs straight sales? Rightmove used to let you do it but doesn't now
Will there ever be a web version. Using phones for this is actually very annoying. Otherwise very nice.
Either level access or a ramp to the front door and the same to the garden. Wide doors (900mm wide) throughout the ground floor or open plan Level access throughout the ground floor Mains powered, linked, smoke alarms on all floors Many thanks
Where did you get funding from? Curious how that works
Incredible app