[timsegraves]

That's a fair question. A lot of the data comes from complaints and reports filed through local government agencies. We try to be very objective with the data and present it to the consumer so they can judge for themselves.

We have also talked about the idea of allowing building owners to comment or make a request to prove that issues in a building have been fixed. Though that would be a little ways down the road.

[iamshs]

Good service. I can totally see myself using this one, but I am in Canada. There will be a bit of risk in this service, and that's ok, not everyone will be happy. it is like carfax, or even like yelp for houses. It requires a bit of polish though. I looked at the sample report, and upon clicking a link give some indication that the data is loading. i clicked 3 4 times before knowing the data is loading. Chronological order of reports/issues should be latest first. Right now, I saw 1997 report on top.

[timsegraves]

Thanks so much for the feedback. The loading is still something we're trying to improve. It's pulling in a large amount of data that takes a bit of time. I think we'll end up doing a nightly roll-up of that data to help improve page load times.

I'll take a look at the chronological sorting issue. From a first glance it is working for me but it could be something else going on. Thanks again for the feedback.

[mkdir_home]

Maybe you could display the data as it is loading? So instead of making the user wait to see all the results you could show the user as the server drip feeds the results to the browser. Just a suggestion.

You produce a lot of data but it is hard to make sense of it all, maybe some kind of comparison tool would be useful?

Also I am very curious how you managed to do the whole nearby celebrity address thing?

This actually has a lot of potential, but I am not sure if you could profit by selling this to real estate agents as something like this kind of makes their job obsolete.

Maybe you could target the renters demographic, people who rent generally switch locations more often (therefore more recurrent to your service) and are not as accommodated by real estate agents and other third parties (probably because they are not spending as much so no fat commissions).

I don't know your business model very well but another idea is maybe leaving the service free and placing advertisements. Your user demographic is looking to buy or rent a property - very valuable to advertisers. So maybe you should cache the pages you generate and add them to an automatically generated sitemap allowing google to index those and hopefully you will start appearing on search results for people looking to buy a property. If you want to be really aggressive you could scrape property listings off real estate websites and pre-generate those to be indexed by google with the intention of appearing on search results.

Sorry, I'm rambling here ;)

[iamshs]

See the elevator in frequent need of repair page pop-up. 1997 report is first. I do not know how the data is being sorted, maybe give user the power to sort it?

Also, I just noticed that the data is actualy quite comprehensive. You have a lot of fluff in-between the detailed data. Dashboard, then some picture carousel, and then map. But the cream of the crop data is buried below. That data is really awesome, pest control, neighbourhood crimes. I am not a UI /UX person, but there has to be a better visual representaion for it. I like how you mention milestones and even famous celebrities in the vicinity, but at first it seems a bit confusing at to what purpose those pictures serve until it hits you. I did not even scroll down at first. I just stopped at dashboard, clicked the reports and that's it. Really good idea, polish it really well. I know a bit superficial advice, but you can get this thing going pretty well. Offer a one-time service too for $20 or so.

[timsegraves]

Cool, I'll check out the sorting issue some more.

That's great feedback as well. We'd debated whether we needed to put a heading above the celebrity carousel and decided to leave it out. I guess we might want to add that in.

Totally agree that the meat of it is down in those datatables. One of our top priorities is to figure out a way to better visualize that. It'll also make the page load much quicker since all that raw data is a lot of HTML to render and send across the wire.

We're still trying to figure out pricing and at this point just want people to use it for free so we can get feedback and iterate and improve before we think about charging. Thanks again for the great feedback.