africajam

Joined 10 years ago

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Member since

Jul 23

Rails and JS developer. Creator of https://rigove.co.uk

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Comment · 2 months ago

Every year rightmove uses statistics about how much time people spend on their website to justify raising prices.

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

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

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

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

Comment · 2 months ago

Ha ha, nice.

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

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

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

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

Comment · 2 months ago

I'm genuinely curious - are you saying this because you know quite a bit about trademark violation?

Comment · 2 months ago

I put my flat in the UK on the market recently and it has given me a lot of insights into how broken the real estate market is! One thing I found particularly annoying is how dominant rightmove is and how much of the traffic for house hunting they control.

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

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

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

Comment · 7 years ago

Yes, I have fond memories of hanging out in their offices above beta house. Amazingly welcoming bunch of people and one of the best things about the Berlin tech scene for me. Hope it works out well for them. I know they were never in it for the money but they deserve a decent payout for their years of commitment.

Comment · 8 years ago

Nice tool - what tech stack are you using?

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

https://github.com/etewiah/property_web_builder

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

Comment · 8 years ago

Introduce yourself here:

https://talk.birmingham.io/

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

Comment · 8 years ago

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

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

https://github.com/etewiah/property_web_builder

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

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

Comment · 8 years ago

Very well presented website - I like it a lot.

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

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