10 ms·

Show HN: I built FabHomePages so your home can have its own homepage in minutes

65 points by etewiah 6y ago

etewiah 6y ago
I planned to put my home in Birmingham on the market earlier this year. Terrible timing ;(. Fortunately the lockdown did give me a lot of time to reflect on the process of selling a home. FabHomePages is the result of that. I used it myself to share the news of my plans with friends and to get feedback. Will soon be adding features to help people plan the process of selling and to connect with service providers.
- nogabebop23 6y ago
  not sure how things work in your jurisdiction, but to sell in our area you basically need to work with an agent to get into the market of home buyers; FSBO just doesn't work. The minute I'm on the hook to pay THAT level of commission, I'm not doing anything in this area; there's so little a real estate agent can do they're definitely going to be responsible for marketing, images, staging etc. From my experience selling anything to real estate agents is a uphill battle. They are understandably extremely cheap. This looks interesting but I think you need to focus on defining your potential market a little more.
  - glxxyz 6y ago
    Exactly. I bought and sold in July. We were in a rush to sell as we had made a firm offer and were facing an unknown market with lockdown just beginning to ease. My realtor staged the condo, built a slick site under their domain with a 3d (Cardboard-compatible) virtual tour and detailed floorplan, put it out on social media, bought ads, printed glossy brochures to leave in the front hallway, and of course put it out on the MLS central listing service. We sold for more than identical pre-Covid listings, enough above what we'd have taken to cover both Agents' fees. FSBO would have been a false economy for us. When I've browsed FSBO property listings they are usually overpriced and/or in disrepair, where the seller has taken a similar level of care with their property maintenance as they are taking with the act of listing it. I think use of Realtors is an example of a Nash equilibrium. Other buyers and sellers use them, so you have too, even though it would be optimal for buyers and sellers for none of us to use them. When I look back at the five properties transactions I've done, it feels like I've paid a lot to Realtors, but in each transaction using a Realtor was the optimal choice.
  - jonnycomputer 6y ago
    Maybe. My neighbor sold his house in under a week last month FSBO. He's a handy contractor that put in a lot to make the home look nice though.
drenvuk 6y ago
Looks cool, Zillow is similar but it unfortunately makes you sign up first. I like this. On an unrelated note, how did this link get onto the front page with only 3 points? How does the ratings thing work here?
- bottled_poe 6y ago
  I would guess clicks are a factor
  - Raed667 6y ago
    How would HN without JS or a URL minifier/redirector know about clicks?
    - bestnameever 6y ago
      they may be referring to clicks to this thread.
    - blisseyGo 6y ago
      Not sure about this particular post but for HN, every action is a HTTP GET request to HN (except when you click on the post's website link itself). So the GET request is pretty much the same as the click on HN. This is just my guess though.
- etewiah 6y ago
  I really don't know. I've tried so many times with different products and got nowhere. Each time I've tried to build something better and I guess I've finally got there. Probably helps that its a free product too.
- iamsb 6y ago
  Hypothesis - A show hn does make it to frontpage with lower number of votes.
- tristan123456 6y ago
  They curate it manually, you get an email saying "we liked it, it'll get a second chance on the first page for a brief time".
etewiah 6y ago
Wow, I'm really getting the HN hug of love! Thank you everyone, really appreciate it. Please, whatever you do though don't post this to product hunt. I'd really appreciate the chance to act on the feedback I get here first.
- drenvuk 6y ago
  bug: if you hit back after going to the add images page after landing on the dashboard you get served a blank page. Still exploring.
- Fiveplus 6y ago
  Oh yeah I logged in to tell you that. I was having a lot of fun customizing the details of a page when I met with a 500 error. Love the idea and execution, the best part would be the presentation mode. Are you planning to add an optional background music option in the future?
onion2k 6y ago
I like the idea, and executing and launching is always good, but the example website (https://luxury-villa.incostadelsol.com/ https://luxury-villa.incostadelsol.com/) looks pretty bad as a tool to sell a €1,499,000 home. The images desperately need some attention as they're blurry on high resolution screens, the design doesn't exactly say "luxury" or "high quality home", and there's way too much animation going on.
- stevievee 6y ago
  I agree but it's close to looking decent - some basic design changes (especially typography) will go a long way.
  - glxxyz 6y ago
    The typography on the main site is pretty bad too. Very cluttered with huge text everywhere. Odd changes of fonts in places.
gus_massa 6y ago
For how long are the trial pages keep live? You will get an huge amount of spam.
Waterluvian 6y ago
Tangentially related: is there a trick to selling a home when you have toddlers? How do you stage and keep it staged? Is there a scenario where I can make a fab home page and other stuff and pass on having an overly staged home?
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  When you stage a home, you move out first.
- bennyp101 6y ago
  We are in the process of doing that, and we've come to the conclusion that we are selling a family home, so it's pointless trying to create it looking like a showhouse. We had a big tidy/clean up, for the virtual tour, and then just have a little potter around with the hoover and pick things up before anyone wants to have a look. When we bought this house, it was nice to be able to see where toys and the kids stuff would actually fit into the house - and that it wouldn't be super cluttered (at least to start with!).
  - glxxyz 6y ago
    Your home will almost definitely sell for more without all the daily life clutter and toys. For example- not all buyers have kids, what you see as a family home may be their new work from home live/office space.
    - jonnycomputer 6y ago
      Probably true, but this is just an obstacle most people don't have anyway to get around. Moving out to a new home or apartment waiting for home to sale can easily be unaffordable to a lot of Americans.
- gwbas1c 6y ago
  I had to move into a rental when I sold my home. The crib stayed vacant for two months. (The commute was too long and we hadn't broken ground on our new home yet.)
i_have_to_speak 6y ago
Oh, it's ((FabHome)Pages), not (Fab(HomePages)). Hmm.
pembrook 6y ago
I think this is a really really great idea. But the execution shown is a cheesy slideshow with horrible quality images. To be honest I think it makes the home look worse than it would otherwise. I think your MVP is too rough to even validate the idea. If people don't start using it, you won't know if its because it's not something they want, or if it's because the design is so bad. I'd look into getting some freelance design help or steal some visual cues from the more established real estate startups out there that have a lot of funding (and subsequently, good design teams). Somebody who would eventually pay for a website for their house is likely to be in a higher price market segment. So you're going to need to make this feel "luxury" to get those customers.
etewiah 6y ago
Once again thanks to everyone who's tried it out, really appreciate it!! Rather than answering every single comment I'm going to reply to the points raised in one place. The main feedback seems to be that it's not polished enough. Completely true and I will work on that for the rest of this week - please have another look next week and let me know what you think. There are also a few people who encountered server errors. Yes, I'm afraid I underestimated the interest. Not a good time right now to upgrade the server but I will do that before the next bit of promotion. Regarding the business model, @nogabebop23 points out about working with estate agents. It really isn't a binary decision to sell your home yourself or use an agent. This tool complements either approach and crucially you can start using it before you make a decision on that - I will add more functionality to make that even more so. I have quickly written a post to explain a bit more about the project: https://medium.com/@weebrix/when-a-hacker-tried-selling-his-home-during-the-corona-lockdown-7b7cb200f7f8?sk=9b6fecba3a89d6c2ef34058ebc357d10 https://medium.com/@weebrix/when-a-hacker-tried-selling-his-... Ah, and regarding how long trial pages will be kept. For those who create an account I will not delete them. For those who don't, they will be deleted after 30 days. Sorry, I will update the terms and conditions to reflect that.
fluidcruft 6y ago
My workplace IT blocks your example website so I just see a scary box in the middle of your landing page that says "Did Not Connect: Potential Security Issue". https://imgur.com/UYKuE4y https://imgur.com/UYKuE4y
- etewiah 6y ago
  Thanks for reporting this. I can't quite understand what happened - the error says firefox did not continue because "this website requires a secure connection". Surely the fact that it is a secure connection is a good thing and not a reason to not connect. I use https for the site and have tested with different browsers including firefox without successfully reproducing.
  - fluidcruft 6y ago
    The example page is being blocked by hospital IT using something called "Cisco Umbrella" which on ancient internet explorer will redirect to display a warning saying that it's been blocked by "Cisco Umbrella", but on everything else the Cisco redirect is detected as MitM and you just get security warnings. Honestly, I'm surprised fabhomepages itself wasn't blocked. I just thought it was odd that one would load and the other wouldn't. So basically what's happening is: https://fabhomepages.com/ https://fabhomepages.com/ : whitelisted https://luxury-villa.incostadelsol.com/ https://luxury-villa.incostadelsol.com/ : blacklisted
gwbas1c 6y ago
I really don't get it. (In the US,) When I sold my home, the realtor did all this stuff. It was all posted on MLS. Furthermore, why would I do this NOW if I have no intention of moving?
jeroenhd 6y ago
Based on the useless scrollbar next to the presentation and next to the demo iframe on the website, I'm guessing this was developed and tested on macOS where scrollbars are invisible. Web designers, please enable scrollbars! Not a great look for someone trying to sell a type of webhosting in my opinion. I'm not sure about the demo case to be honest. If you're trying to sell a villa that's worth a 1.5m euros, you should probably spend some money and invest in something more professional than the Wix of home sales.
Minor49er 6y ago
Reminds me of a feature on Total Expert's CRM for creating site pages. It's not open access, but there's an overview of it here: https://blog.totalexpert.com/5-features-every-single-property-site-needs https://blog.totalexpert.com/5-features-every-single-propert... Total Expert's offering is geared more towards real estate agents, but the interfaces are both pretty similar. The only major difference I see so far is that FabHomePages doesn't take an address and automatically load it with listing images (or at least from what I have seen so far), though that would make sense since FabHomePages seems to be for individual sellers who probably have their own photos to work with.
yourapostasy 6y ago
I've always wanted a home ERP. Starting from the digitized survey, to ground-penetrating radar survey digitized results to show exact septic layout and the bedrock profile along that layout, to exact DGPS locations of every brush and tree, to precise topology map, to a precise BOM of the house, vendors, pricing, invoices, quotations, Bill Of Tools used for installing each piece, dimensions, wire run lengths, known ratings (like compressive strength of the concrete used), warranty information, product manuals, CAD drawings in an open source format, schematics (electrical, plumbing, HVAC), maintenance cycles, tools and supplies for each maintenance incident, scheduling of maintenance, budgeting of maintenance, lifecycle budgeting, and so on. I'd like to use some kind of combined voice input, AR glasses and scanning from my smartphone to automate the data entry of this kind of information as it passes my hands. Here's to hoping something like FabHomePages eventually morphs into such an ERP.
mackle_hair 6y ago
nice idea - would be good to prompt for my email more. i dont currently want to sell my home but when i do i'd like to have you in my email history so i can look you up and remember you.
- mackle_hair 6y ago
  i just tried to sign up and it failed when i put in my email address.
  - etewiah 6y ago
    Thanks for the heads up. I can see that a user who's email starts with "mx" signed up but did not login. Can you describe the exact error you got? And if you don't mind please send me an email (my username at hotmail.com) so I can follow up. Thanks again
rubyn00bie 6y ago
Good luck with this, but I haven’t seen traction with any product like this because people just don’t care. The real estate market is one of the worst to operate in as a technology company without an extremely large endowment to start you out. Homeowners in general don’t care to keep records of their homes in digital format, nor make information about their home public. They say they do but when push comes to shove and they have to pay, no one will pay. I’m not trying to be a downer but I’m still wearing scars from my time doing real estate tech and can’t recommend it to anyone as a start up or business. It’s awful and not fixable.

65 points by etewiah 6y ago

I planned to put my home in Birmingham on the market earlier this year. Terrible timing ;(. Fortunately the lockdown did give me a lot of time to reflect on the process of selling a home. FabHomePages is the result of that. I used it myself to share the news of my plans with friends and to get feedback. Will soon be adding features to help people plan the process of selling and to connect with service providers.

nogabebop23 6y ago
not sure how things work in your jurisdiction, but to sell in our area you basically need to work with an agent to get into the market of home buyers; FSBO just doesn't work. The minute I'm on the hook to pay THAT level of commission, I'm not doing anything in this area; there's so little a real estate agent can do they're definitely going to be responsible for marketing, images, staging etc. From my experience selling anything to real estate agents is a uphill battle. They are understandably extremely cheap. This looks interesting but I think you need to focus on defining your potential market a little more.
- glxxyz 6y ago
  Exactly. I bought and sold in July. We were in a rush to sell as we had made a firm offer and were facing an unknown market with lockdown just beginning to ease. My realtor staged the condo, built a slick site under their domain with a 3d (Cardboard-compatible) virtual tour and detailed floorplan, put it out on social media, bought ads, printed glossy brochures to leave in the front hallway, and of course put it out on the MLS central listing service. We sold for more than identical pre-Covid listings, enough above what we'd have taken to cover both Agents' fees. FSBO would have been a false economy for us. When I've browsed FSBO property listings they are usually overpriced and/or in disrepair, where the seller has taken a similar level of care with their property maintenance as they are taking with the act of listing it. I think use of Realtors is an example of a Nash equilibrium. Other buyers and sellers use them, so you have too, even though it would be optimal for buyers and sellers for none of us to use them. When I look back at the five properties transactions I've done, it feels like I've paid a lot to Realtors, but in each transaction using a Realtor was the optimal choice.
- jonnycomputer 6y ago
  Maybe. My neighbor sold his house in under a week last month FSBO. He's a handy contractor that put in a lot to make the home look nice though.

drenvuk 6y ago

Looks cool, Zillow is similar but it unfortunately makes you sign up first. I like this. On an unrelated note, how did this link get onto the front page with only 3 points? How does the ratings thing work here?

bottled_poe 6y ago
I would guess clicks are a factor
- Raed667 6y ago
  How would HN without JS or a URL minifier/redirector know about clicks?
  - bestnameever 6y ago
    they may be referring to clicks to this thread.
  - blisseyGo 6y ago
    Not sure about this particular post but for HN, every action is a HTTP GET request to HN (except when you click on the post's website link itself). So the GET request is pretty much the same as the click on HN. This is just my guess though.
etewiah 6y ago
I really don't know. I've tried so many times with different products and got nowhere. Each time I've tried to build something better and I guess I've finally got there. Probably helps that its a free product too.
iamsb 6y ago
Hypothesis - A show hn does make it to frontpage with lower number of votes.
tristan123456 6y ago
They curate it manually, you get an email saying "we liked it, it'll get a second chance on the first page for a brief time".

etewiah 6y ago

Wow, I'm really getting the HN hug of love! Thank you everyone, really appreciate it. Please, whatever you do though don't post this to product hunt. I'd really appreciate the chance to act on the feedback I get here first.

drenvuk 6y ago
bug: if you hit back after going to the add images page after landing on the dashboard you get served a blank page. Still exploring.
Fiveplus 6y ago
Oh yeah I logged in to tell you that. I was having a lot of fun customizing the details of a page when I met with a 500 error. Love the idea and execution, the best part would be the presentation mode. Are you planning to add an optional background music option in the future?

onion2k 6y ago

I like the idea, and executing and launching is always good, but the example website (https://luxury-villa.incostadelsol.com/ https://luxury-villa.incostadelsol.com/) looks pretty bad as a tool to sell a €1,499,000 home. The images desperately need some attention as they're blurry on high resolution screens, the design doesn't exactly say "luxury" or "high quality home", and there's way too much animation going on.

stevievee 6y ago
I agree but it's close to looking decent - some basic design changes (especially typography) will go a long way.
- glxxyz 6y ago
  The typography on the main site is pretty bad too. Very cluttered with huge text everywhere. Odd changes of fonts in places.

gus_massa 6y ago

For how long are the trial pages keep live? You will get an huge amount of spam.

Waterluvian 6y ago

Tangentially related: is there a trick to selling a home when you have toddlers? How do you stage and keep it staged? Is there a scenario where I can make a fab home page and other stuff and pass on having an overly staged home?

srtjstjsj 6y ago
When you stage a home, you move out first.
bennyp101 6y ago
We are in the process of doing that, and we've come to the conclusion that we are selling a family home, so it's pointless trying to create it looking like a showhouse. We had a big tidy/clean up, for the virtual tour, and then just have a little potter around with the hoover and pick things up before anyone wants to have a look. When we bought this house, it was nice to be able to see where toys and the kids stuff would actually fit into the house - and that it wouldn't be super cluttered (at least to start with!).
- glxxyz 6y ago
  Your home will almost definitely sell for more without all the daily life clutter and toys. For example- not all buyers have kids, what you see as a family home may be their new work from home live/office space.
  - jonnycomputer 6y ago
    Probably true, but this is just an obstacle most people don't have anyway to get around. Moving out to a new home or apartment waiting for home to sale can easily be unaffordable to a lot of Americans.
gwbas1c 6y ago
I had to move into a rental when I sold my home. The crib stayed vacant for two months. (The commute was too long and we hadn't broken ground on our new home yet.)

i_have_to_speak 6y ago

Oh, it's ((FabHome)Pages), not (Fab(HomePages)). Hmm.

pembrook 6y ago

I think this is a really really great idea. But the execution shown is a cheesy slideshow with horrible quality images. To be honest I think it makes the home look worse than it would otherwise. I think your MVP is too rough to even validate the idea. If people don't start using it, you won't know if its because it's not something they want, or if it's because the design is so bad. I'd look into getting some freelance design help or steal some visual cues from the more established real estate startups out there that have a lot of funding (and subsequently, good design teams). Somebody who would eventually pay for a website for their house is likely to be in a higher price market segment. So you're going to need to make this feel "luxury" to get those customers.

etewiah 6y ago

Once again thanks to everyone who's tried it out, really appreciate it!! Rather than answering every single comment I'm going to reply to the points raised in one place. The main feedback seems to be that it's not polished enough. Completely true and I will work on that for the rest of this week - please have another look next week and let me know what you think. There are also a few people who encountered server errors. Yes, I'm afraid I underestimated the interest. Not a good time right now to upgrade the server but I will do that before the next bit of promotion. Regarding the business model, @nogabebop23 points out about working with estate agents. It really isn't a binary decision to sell your home yourself or use an agent. This tool complements either approach and crucially you can start using it before you make a decision on that - I will add more functionality to make that even more so. I have quickly written a post to explain a bit more about the project: https://medium.com/@weebrix/when-a-hacker-tried-selling-his-home-during-the-corona-lockdown-7b7cb200f7f8?sk=9b6fecba3a89d6c2ef34058ebc357d10 https://medium.com/@weebrix/when-a-hacker-tried-selling-his-... Ah, and regarding how long trial pages will be kept. For those who create an account I will not delete them. For those who don't, they will be deleted after 30 days. Sorry, I will update the terms and conditions to reflect that.

fluidcruft 6y ago

My workplace IT blocks your example website so I just see a scary box in the middle of your landing page that says "Did Not Connect: Potential Security Issue". https://imgur.com/UYKuE4y https://imgur.com/UYKuE4y

etewiah 6y ago
Thanks for reporting this. I can't quite understand what happened - the error says firefox did not continue because "this website requires a secure connection". Surely the fact that it is a secure connection is a good thing and not a reason to not connect. I use https for the site and have tested with different browsers including firefox without successfully reproducing.
- fluidcruft 6y ago
  The example page is being blocked by hospital IT using something called "Cisco Umbrella" which on ancient internet explorer will redirect to display a warning saying that it's been blocked by "Cisco Umbrella", but on everything else the Cisco redirect is detected as MitM and you just get security warnings. Honestly, I'm surprised fabhomepages itself wasn't blocked. I just thought it was odd that one would load and the other wouldn't. So basically what's happening is: https://fabhomepages.com/ https://fabhomepages.com/ : whitelisted https://luxury-villa.incostadelsol.com/ https://luxury-villa.incostadelsol.com/ : blacklisted

gwbas1c 6y ago

I really don't get it. (In the US,) When I sold my home, the realtor did all this stuff. It was all posted on MLS. Furthermore, why would I do this NOW if I have no intention of moving?

jeroenhd 6y ago

Based on the useless scrollbar next to the presentation and next to the demo iframe on the website, I'm guessing this was developed and tested on macOS where scrollbars are invisible. Web designers, please enable scrollbars! Not a great look for someone trying to sell a type of webhosting in my opinion. I'm not sure about the demo case to be honest. If you're trying to sell a villa that's worth a 1.5m euros, you should probably spend some money and invest in something more professional than the Wix of home sales.

Minor49er 6y ago

Reminds me of a feature on Total Expert's CRM for creating site pages. It's not open access, but there's an overview of it here: https://blog.totalexpert.com/5-features-every-single-property-site-needs https://blog.totalexpert.com/5-features-every-single-propert... Total Expert's offering is geared more towards real estate agents, but the interfaces are both pretty similar. The only major difference I see so far is that FabHomePages doesn't take an address and automatically load it with listing images (or at least from what I have seen so far), though that would make sense since FabHomePages seems to be for individual sellers who probably have their own photos to work with.

yourapostasy 6y ago

I've always wanted a home ERP. Starting from the digitized survey, to ground-penetrating radar survey digitized results to show exact septic layout and the bedrock profile along that layout, to exact DGPS locations of every brush and tree, to precise topology map, to a precise BOM of the house, vendors, pricing, invoices, quotations, Bill Of Tools used for installing each piece, dimensions, wire run lengths, known ratings (like compressive strength of the concrete used), warranty information, product manuals, CAD drawings in an open source format, schematics (electrical, plumbing, HVAC), maintenance cycles, tools and supplies for each maintenance incident, scheduling of maintenance, budgeting of maintenance, lifecycle budgeting, and so on. I'd like to use some kind of combined voice input, AR glasses and scanning from my smartphone to automate the data entry of this kind of information as it passes my hands. Here's to hoping something like FabHomePages eventually morphs into such an ERP.

mackle_hair 6y ago

nice idea - would be good to prompt for my email more. i dont currently want to sell my home but when i do i'd like to have you in my email history so i can look you up and remember you.

mackle_hair 6y ago
i just tried to sign up and it failed when i put in my email address.
- etewiah 6y ago
  Thanks for the heads up. I can see that a user who's email starts with "mx" signed up but did not login. Can you describe the exact error you got? And if you don't mind please send me an email (my username at hotmail.com) so I can follow up. Thanks again

rubyn00bie 6y ago

Good luck with this, but I haven’t seen traction with any product like this because people just don’t care. The real estate market is one of the worst to operate in as a technology company without an extremely large endowment to start you out. Homeowners in general don’t care to keep records of their homes in digital format, nor make information about their home public. They say they do but when push comes to shove and they have to pay, no one will pay. I’m not trying to be a downer but I’m still wearing scars from my time doing real estate tech and can’t recommend it to anyone as a start up or business. It’s awful and not fixable.