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by irremediable 3053 days ago
Probably too small a demand.

The general problem is property search with lots of options, and even that is a tricky niche... I worked at a company that tried to do this, and in the end we found it's too much work per niche.

Maybe if NLP gets a lot better.

1 comments

Can you quantify the small demand somehow?

Is an apartment with a view not something many people want?

When I look at r/digitalnomad, the top post right now is somebody showing of the view of their apartment.

Booking.com has a filter 'View'. So there must be some demand, right? The filter just does not work. When I look at apartments with a view in Bangkok the first 3 they show me are:

https://www.booking.com/hotel/th/bangkokshortstay-3br-sukhum...

https://www.booking.com/hotel/th/aspira-parc-39.html

https://www.booking.com/hotel/th/ekkamai-prestige.html

None of these are what I mean with an apartment with a view. Some are just hotel rooms. Some seem to not have a view.

Estimate how many people are searching for property at a given time, how many of them would use your view-focused site (a tiny fraction), how many of them would find something through it and hence give you income (probably referral bonus from whatever big property listers you're partnering with).

Now weigh that against the cost of creating/running a site, and digging out the properties with a view.

I've not done this rigorously at all. But in the site I worked on, I suspect people filtering by facets similar to "has a view" were, optimistically, about 1% of our engaged audience. Conversion rates were like 5%. So that was probably a few tens of people per day (we had a fairly big audience!)

If you monetise by referral bonuses, you'll probably get tens of dollars per referral. So at most ~100USD per day.

Now consider the costs of setting up and running such a site. Remember that we were a global property search engine -- to get that thousands-strong audience, we were running all over the world.

IMO it just doesn't add up.

You can always prove me wrong! One way might be to focus on high-end clients, and somehow make more money from them... larger referral bonuses, for example, or having the clients pay you to find them properties with a good view.

But yeah, I remain sceptical.