Released May 2007
Nestoria's success in the United Kingdom prompted Lokku Limited, the company behind the property search engine, to expand overseas in May 2007. Nestoria Spain, buscador de pisos y casas, makes its appearance less than one year before the launch of the UK site in June 2006.
One of the 'purest' vertical search engines on the net, Nestoria aggregates listings of homes from property portals and delivers them to Internet users in an easy-to-use and clear interface. Home seekers appreciate the simplicity and relevancy of the search results offered by Nestoria
Nestoria co-Founder and CEO Javier Etxebeste says: "Spain is an exciting venture for a property search engine. The housing market is tremendously active. It uniquely combines the highest proportion of new builds - promociones - in Europe with its appeal as an investment target. Nestoria set up partnerships with Spanish key players and local content providers to build an innovative, user-oriented and comprehensive service".
The Spanish site can be visited at Nestoria - Encuentra pisos y casas. It features the same usability of its British equivalent adapted to the local market and users in more than one way. The size of the properties, for instance, is even more relevant to the home seeker than the number of bedrooms. The price in both Euro and pesetas, the former Spanish currency. Specific language sophistications go unnoticed to the naked eye when visiting the British and Spanish sites.
Traditional property portals regard Nestoria as a new channel to raise the exposure of their listings with precision and efficiency. As a vertical search engine, Nestoria does not take property listings directly from estate agents. Portals are the only source of revenues of Nestoria.
For the launch in Spain, Nestoria has linked up with some of the country's major real estate portal sites to provide over 250,000 property listings. The estimated the total listings in Spain is about 400,000. The project of expanding to Spain took great care in understanding the local specificities of the market.
Nestoria users in the UK appreciate the fact that the search engine behaves like a truly local one. Not only it is possible to narrow down search by areas and cities, but also to type of property (house or flat), budget and number of bedrooms. Searches can be bookmarked for regular updates, like flats to rent in Birmingham for less than £1,000 per month or houses for sale in East Dulwich with at least four bedrooms. Similar granularity was implemented in Nestoria Spain, where it is possible to find houses not only by town, but also by quarter, the popular "barrio" in Spanish property terminology, eg. pisos en Chamartin, Madrid.
Searches will be soon enhanced with queries with keywords. Users will be able to filter their results by naturally relevant terms like garden, parking, etc.
Ed Freyfogle, Nestoria's CTO, attributes the enormous growth of the last year to their 'keep it simple' approach. The challenges consists in organizing and delivering information in a relevant way to users searching for precise homes for sale or to rent. Nestoria invest a lot of resources in understanding was is important to users to find for them the ideal flat or house in the shortest possible time.
Nestoria combines the power of the new vertical search engines with an innovative development in online mapping. This consists in geolocating with precision hundreds of thousands of homes for sale and to rent in the UK. Google themselves recently validated the application to the point of presenting Nestoria as a successful case study of the use of Google Maps.
Javier Etxebeste adds, "Our experience in the search environment is that simplicity and clarity is king. Nestoria is here to help the industry, agents, portals and software providers evolve. We think a collaborative approach ensures at the end of the day a better user experience and benefits everyone".
Nestoria was founded by Former Yahoo! senior executives Javier Etxebeste and Ed Freyfogle in June 2006. Their vision was to help property portals reach home seekers more effiently than through the traditional channels. They remain convinced that Nestoria can't do a better job than the property portals in their commercial relationship with estate agents. Nestoria customers are established property portals in each country.