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Show HN: Larry's Cheap Houses – Deep Learning Powered Real Estate Deals
- AznHisoka 9y agoOften when there is a great deal, it means there is something wrong with the house or neighborhood.
- rco8786 9y agoWorth nothing that neither of those things disqualifies something from being a great deal.
- ams6110 9y agoIn fact that often defines a great deal. If a house has a problem and you know how to deal with it but most buyers won't want to bother, that can make a really great deal.
- jeffreyrogers 9y agoThe neighborhood matters if you have kids because it determines what schools your kids can go to.
- HeyLaughingBoy 9y ago"Wrong" is highly subjective.
- stcredzero 9y agoI'm getting a "Secure Connection Failed."
- aphextron 9y agoWhat exactly constitutes a "cheap house" though? Just because a house is ultra cheap in absolute sticker price does not make it a good deal, or even "cheap". It's a combination of neighborhood home values, property taxes, school system, local economy, demand, geography, appreciation rate, and climate which make a home a good investment, with the actual home itself mattering least among those. There's definitely a lot of undervalued real estate in the US, but just looking for cheap houses is a bad idea.
- jbuild 9y agoSo it scrapes lots of listing websites and emails when there’s a good deal? What qualifies as a good deal? How does the were does the deep learning fit it? Interesting idea, maybe you could put more info on the linked page.
- whoisjuan 9y agoIt sounds like a bullshit statement, to be honest. This is probably just a hand-picked curation of listings that fit the criteria this guy uses to determine if it's a good investment or not.
- Arubis 9y agoI know "great artists steal" but man is this cutting it close compared to Scott's Cheap Flights. I mean, you even took the same copy text. What's funny is I'm not even sure if I mean that accusatorially or admiringly. Maybe both.
- lawrencewu 9y agoHey Arubis, you're absolutely right. I copied the model from Scott (even the domain name). I'm unabashedly a huge fan and early subscriber of his newsletter since mid-2014.
- swyx 9y agoi have very little doubt that the eponymous Scott would not mind. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery :)
- rdmltrs9 9y agoGreat idea! I’m looking to invest in real estate and have found the hardest part about it is surfacing interesting deals. If an AI can be parameterized to search for me, so much the better.
- drenvuk 9y agoThis could be useful. I find it interesting that the two examples of cheap houses on the front page are in areas that have had severely damaging weather but I guess you could find cheap houses there. Will I get notifications for places in Detroit as well? I think this site will work in many cases except the best. The best cases come from finding an owner before they list their home, which is pretty rare. When there's a service that does that I might consider signing up.
- teeray 9y ago> "Send me great real estate deals" Why can't I just browse them? I honestly don't want to deal with your spam in my inbox every day.
- nsb1 9y agotry: greatdeals@mailinator.com
- teeray 9y agoI will, but mentioning mailinator usually leads to its domains getting blacklisted :)
- nsb1 9y agoHeh. True. I'm with you though - I want to browse on my schedule, not be pushed yet more email that I have to sift through.
- justboxing 9y ago> not be pushed yet more email that I have to sift through Makes sense, but I believe it's a lot easier to monetize an email list of niche subscribers for something like this.[1] [1] Source : 320K / mo => https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/scotts-cheap-flights-from-small-side-project-to-booming-business-de62ca54b1 https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/scotts-cheap-flights-...
- justboxing 9y ago> Why can't I just browse them? I think the business model is based on email subscribers. OP has mentioned elsewhere[1] here that he modeled the site and offering very closely based on Scott's Cheap Flights .com which was in the Cheap Flights domain. See their story on IH. 320K / month in recurring revenue. https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/scotts-cheap-flights-from-small-side-project-to-booming-business-de62ca54b1 https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/scotts-cheap-flights-... [1] : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16579003 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16579003
- id_ris 9y agois there anything to verify that this isn't clickbait to get addresses for an email list
- mavhc 9y agoBuy houses so that people who need to buy houses can't!
- justboxing 9y agoCongrats on shipping! I was looking for something like this. I did see that you have 1 past deal listed on home page. It would be great if you can add just a single page titled "Past Deals" or "Highlighted Deals" and show a few houses that your AI bot identified. That's more likely to encourage potential subs. Also, how do you calc the CAP rate etc? Do you crawl existing sites that already have this data, or do you generate it on the fly? If the latter, how? And how does your site / email list stack up against the following (which I think are somewhat related to what you are doing). 1) RoofStock.com - https://www.roofstock.com https://www.roofstock.com - Based in Oakland, they do end to end investing online, from intent to closing on mortgage. Most are already rented too, and they even provide Property Management services. They have a great engineering team. I even landed a Sr. Software Engineer position with them last fall, but ended up turning it down. Highly recommend if you are looking for a tech job... I think they are still hiring. 2) Mashvisor - https://www.mashvisor.com https://www.mashvisor.com - Based in Silicon Valley (I think). They identify and list properties with AirBnB and Vaca rental potential. I like them too, but their sales team is very pushy and you can't do anything without signing up for a monthly subscription. I had a demo with their sales guy last year, and the whole thing was geared towards getting me to signup and pay.
- _coveredInBees 9y agoThis is such buzzword powered horseshit. Absolutely nothing about this problem domain requires Deep Learning. Simple regression models if implemented properly can do just fine. Not to mention that sites like Redfin/Zillow have access to far more data and already have pretty good models for the most part. Just because you can throw a Neural net at a given problem, doesn't make it the right thing to do... I'd be a lot more forgiving if the site that was linked was an actual blog post that contained information on how deep learning helped tackle this problem. But all the site is, is a way to aggregate emails while throwing buzzwords in your face.
- nedwin 9y agoDoes it make it the wrong thing to do? I've never seen anyone so mad at someone for their technical decisions. Redin/Zillow et al won't show you cap rates.
- timClicks 9y agoYes. It's completely overblown. To me, that demonstrates that the person behind this is either a) ignorant of the fundamentals or b) just riding the hype wave to attract the naive. There is of course option c). That would be that taking a contrarian view on the technology will provide a strategic advantage to a business. But I don't see how that would apply here.
- _coveredInBees 9y agoIt's not just technical decisions... the entire site is a single web-page with zero content except for trying to harvest emails. I mean, if you want people to spam such low quality stuff on HN, then I guess that's your prerogative. But I usually enjoy the much higher quality stuff that people post here on HN and I'd hate for the bar to drop this low.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- lawrencewu 9y agoHey there. I found that regression models do okay when the feature-set is simple. And I can see that deep learning seems like overkill but I found that it can create models that does justice to the complexity of real estate.
- tomc1985 9y agoFuck the investor market. Cheap housing should go to people who will actually live in it, not rent it out or sit on it.
- toomuchtodo 9y agoBuild said cheap housing. Money has to come from somewhere.
- faitswulff 9y agoHey Larry, quick recommendation for your photo at the end - you should probably get a better professional photo that conveys reliability and confidence in your body language, or at the very least, flip the image so it draws readers' eyes toward the text. Ex. https://imgur.com/a/0tb01 https://imgur.com/a/0tb01
- lawrencewu 9y agoThanks for your comment. Working on this now!
- faitswulff 9y agoDidn't mean to come off as harsh, but it was distracting to me. Good luck on the launch!
- abraae 9y agoReally? I think the photo's OK. Tie unloosened, good mix of casual + business like. Can't detect any obvious lack of confidence. Making his head point towards the text seems like one of those cheesy commercials where a smiling person points at the text next to them.
- faitswulff 9y agoWith regards to the last point, there's actual research to back this up: #3 with the headline "Directional Cues" https://blog.kissmetrics.com/eye-tracking-studies/ https://blog.kissmetrics.com/eye-tracking-studies/ Also, looking down and away from another person is not confidence inspiring. I don't think I need to cite research in order to point that out.
- abraae 9y agoHa ha, its very hard to argue with that. Very impressive.
- AdmiralAsshat 9y agoNo privacy policy is kind of a red flag. I mean I'm assuming this is a proof of concept / work in progress, but I also have to assume you're gonna want to monetize it at some point, so I want to know what you're gonna do with my e-mail address before I give it to you.
- philtar 9y agoI assure you, whatever you think is the worst case scenario has already happened with your email.
- matt_heimer 9y agoPressing the button without entering an email results in a popup that says: Error! Please contact us at founders@larryscheaphouses.com and we'll figure out what's going on. Considering the number of people that are going to glance over the text and assume that the button lets them see the deals you might want to have some basic help text.
- sharemywin 9y agomight want an about us page or something. and list the email.
- awad 9y agoI'm getting this even while entering an email
- jjazwiecki 9y agoThis reminds me of a question I've long had – is there no legal restriction on starting a real estate listing service?
- justboxing 9y agoIANAL but it looks like -- and it's hard to tell for sure, as there is no sample email -- OP's site is "Linking" w/ some additional data, not "Listing".
- arikr 9y agoLarry - what did you use for the design of the site? Custom, or which website builder or template/framework if you used one? Looks great!
- jcsnv 9y agoWhat is the pros/cons between this and something like Realty Shares? Wouldn't sending an email to a bunch of RE buyers create demand for a cheap property, which would (in theory) raise the bid, which would cascade to making the listing "not cheap"? - Playing devils advocate on this one since I'm sure not everyone would bid for the same properties.
- adventured 9y agoTip for @lawrencewu Real-estate investors are not looking for houses in the US and Canada. They're looking for investments in Los Angeles, or Kansas, or Salt Lake City, or Arlington Virginia, et al. If you're sending deals to someone in Arizona, for New Hampshire or South Carolina properties, they're overwhelmingly going to fall flat. Whenever you have the listing breadth to do it, you need to segment the emails down closer to the end user location, or at least make that an option when they sign-up. If I'm looking for a real-estate investments as a normal tier investor (ie I'm not super rich) that might own between one and a few properties, and I live in Boston, I am not investing in properties in Phoenix outside of unusual circumstances (eg the great recession, or going in with someone I just happen to know from there that will handle things locally in Phoenix). I'd probably go further and suggest you knock down the pin for a specific market first, before sending out broad spectrum listings spanning the US in an email list. Starting out beyond that narrow focus, imo, dramatically increases the odds of failure, that you never properly connect to your email receivers (they don't get enough properties for their local interest, and dump your email list).
- africajam 9y agoFor anyone looking to build a product that relies on aggregating real estate data I've built an open source web scraper specifically for real estate: https://github.com/RealEstateWebTools/property_web_scraper https://github.com/RealEstateWebTools/property_web_scraper