Show HN: Search Away – Housing search companion

Show HN: Search Away – Housing search companion(searchaway.co)

7 points by rjieger 3 years ago | 7 comments

Hey HN, excited to share a side project I’ve been working on for the past few months. This started after getting frustrated trying to figure out where to live. I wanted an easy way to see how an area was changing. Are schools improving or getting worse? Is housing inventory increasing or decreasing? How does this compare to historic levels?

Search Away brings together housing, income, school, census and crime data for over 33,000 zip codes and 87,000 schools. Housing data is updated monthly. All other information is updated when more recent data is published (every few months).

Hope this helps you discover new places and makes it easier to find a home.

Looking forward to feedback.

cbreynoldson 3 years ago |

Great stuff! I can see a lot of potential with this. I think most of the information you provide for each area are very useful. Love the focus on zipcodes - much better than a city as a whole.

Couple comments: Some of the data/charts are hard to understand right off the bat. I'm not sure it will be clear to everyone what certain scores mean to them. I think it might be useful to take a look at how https://nomadlist.com/ does it.

This is probably obvious to you, but it would be nice to have more tangible and qualitative data for each area. School ranks, violent incidents, etc. are important, but there's so much more that goes into making these decisions! I'm not sure how you'll get this qualitative data unless user-generated, but I think it's critical.

Depth (not just breadth) is very important. E.g. I think people are more likely to use a "here's a complete look at X city" than a "here's a brief look at EVERY city!"

Love what you're doing. Who is your ideal demographic right now? Young families?

rjieger 3 years ago | |

Thank you! Wow, can't believe I've never seen nomadlist. I imagine Search Away would look similar if I could afford hiring a designer.

Agree, qualitative data would be great. Niche has the ability to add reviews but I don't think that's the right approach. I'll have to keep thinking about other ways of getting quality user-generated data. I think it would be really cool if a town official provided a quarterly/annual statement highlighting their area but that might be too time-consuming and expensive to get.

Young families, first-time home buyers and anyone making a move to an area they aren't familiar with.

Thanks for the feedback!

pieterhg 3 years ago | | |

I make Nomad List alone and don't have a designer either, so you can do it too :D

Eleena 3 years ago |

I love the map function, it makes it simple to see not only your zip code of interest but the surrounding areas too! I would like to see more detail on the axes, especially as someone who doesn't come from a real estate background or isn't familiar with how school rankings work etc., maybe even a blurb that introduces the graphic and why this data is important to me. I'm looking forward to the compare zipcodes feature, that will be really useful deciding between cities or neighborhoods. Overall I think this is a great idea for people moving to a new city and have no idea which neighborhood to choose.

rjieger 3 years ago | |

Thanks Eleena! The Map the first page developed. I was surprised when I couldn't find anything similar.

I'm not sure anyone knows how school rankings work. From what I understand the published data can only be compared to past performance and to other schools in the same state. Check out https://nces.ed.gov/ if you want to learn about how the data is collected and reported.

Thanks for the feedback. I'll look into adding a blurb or something to explain the data.

adamh5430 3 years ago |

Woah, solid information on my zip code! This is helpful for schools districts too. Are you planning on any 3rd party integrations into housing?

rjieger 3 years ago | |

Thanks! Nothing planned. What were you thinking?