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Ask HN: If I build it, will you pay? (CRM for home buyers)

Inspired by a comment related to another thread I saw yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2184603 I decided to take the plunge and try to do a bit of market validation for an idea that I had a while back. TLDR; If I build a CRM for home buyers to help with the home buying process, would you pay to use it? The idea would be to either automatically scrape Zillow/Trulia for listings in a certain area then parse the data and do a bunch of validation on it and/or allow the users to paste the url of a listing and import its data via web scraping as well. -------- The details During the pandemic, like many people, my wife and I toyed with the idea of buying a home. I found the process quite cumbersome and a time sink. When we started to look at different homes, it quickly got out of hand. For each property we had to: - remember when we went to the open houses - who the real estate agent was that we talked to - what we liked about each property - where it was located compared to other points of interest - how long it would take to commute from there to both our workplaces - how it compared to previous properties we saw earlier(number of bathrooms, bedrooms, land size, parking spaces…) - calculate the potential loan repayments for each property and see if we could actually afford them based on our down payment and so on… - keep track of potential renovations to do on each property - create stand alone folders of pictures of each property and label them properly -------- First step: The free browser extension To ease the burden a bit , I quickly created an extension that calculates your home loan repayments on the go while browsing real estate listings. I don’t know about you but seeing on a listing that a particular property will cost approximately for example $650 per week helps me better understand if I can afford it instead of simply seeing a number like $450000. It works on https://realestate.com.au , https://domain.com.au, https://zillow.com and https://trulia.com You can get it for Chrome here: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/real-estate-buddy/idhhfoemdabklbkdabbodgbahfedfljp Or for Firefox here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/real-estate-buddy/?utm_source=addons.mozilla.org&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=search This helped a lot as we could now browse listings and see how each property would affect our budget should we choose to buy it. -------- The potential features of the CRM (this is a non exclusive list, some already exist as part of the MVP I created for myself but others don’t) - be able to quickly import data from the listings - be able to tag each property with custom tags - be able to add comments to properties - be able to calculate commute times from certain points of interest or workplaces - add pictures to listings and have the ability to label the pictures - be able to compare two properties’ features - apply custom validation rules to each property (for example, the property should cost no more than 5 times gross yearly salary) - keep track when the property was seen, who the agent was, if the price is negotiable and so forth -------- The MVP I have built most of the functionality as an MVP for myself and I use it to monitor certain suburbs back in Australia to see how the system performs. It's very rough around the edges so it will probably take about two months(while working full time at my day job) to polish it enough to release it to users and fix up all the bugs and make the UI visually appealing. -------- The team (me) My website is at http://www.yannhulot.com. I am a French-Australian software developer currently living in Stockholm. -------- I am looking for any feedback and comments. Please don’t hold anything back. Also if this idea ends up being worth pursuing, I would be looking for a co-founder, so if you are interested, please let me know in the comments.

curuinor 4y ago
People do not actually tell you the answer to a question like this. "Would you pay to use this new thing I made?" gets parsed into "are you a polite person and not inclined to shit on a complete stranger's work?" and you will never get a straight answer, in the same general vein as corporate feasibility studies basically seldom ever returning a 'no, this isn't feasible'. I recommend r. fitzpatrick's book "the mom test" about that subject. After people reply (if they reply) to this thing, you will have learned nothing about whether people would actually pay for it. Go and learn that fact in actual viable ways.
- curuinor 4y ago
  Also, wrt the specific domain, multiple real estate markets throughout the world are choking to death by the very specific method of no transactions happening, chiefly mainland china but also all throughout the west.
- rdm_blackhole 4y ago
  Thanks for your comment. I have heard about the book "the mom test" and plan to read it as it 's been recommended quite a few times to me already. I get this post was a long shot but the thread I was referring to got a few answers so I thought why not see what the HN community thinks of this idea? I am assuming that "Go and learn that fact in actual viable ways." means to release it and then go from there. I may just do that in the end. I simply did not want to spend more time than necessary on an idea that may be completely wrong.
  - rozenmd 4y ago
    Actually go and read The Mom Test before you build anything else, or try any further customer conversations. It'll save you a ton of time.
mytailorisrich 4y ago
Regarding affordability, I think what most people do is the other way round: You do a bit of homework to see how much you can afford, which gives you a maximum price. After that, "simply seeing a number like $450000" clicks immediately because you just compare that to your max, and that obviously allows you to narrow down your search. In any case, most property portals already have widgets showing estimates of monthly payments. And if they don't and this is a useful feature they'll just add it. Some have features to save properties, etc. (Looks like realestate.com.au is very similar to the main one here in the UK, rightmove.co.uk, and they also seem to have a "renovation estimator") Overall, I think this is a important thing to consider: The features that are not too difficult to implement and integrate in those major property portals, and they will be available for free. So I think the question is not whether the idea has a market (it has one) but whether an independent, paid-for product is viable. If there are none that might tell you something...

curuinor 4y ago

People do not actually tell you the answer to a question like this. "Would you pay to use this new thing I made?" gets parsed into "are you a polite person and not inclined to shit on a complete stranger's work?" and you will never get a straight answer, in the same general vein as corporate feasibility studies basically seldom ever returning a 'no, this isn't feasible'. I recommend r. fitzpatrick's book "the mom test" about that subject. After people reply (if they reply) to this thing, you will have learned nothing about whether people would actually pay for it. Go and learn that fact in actual viable ways.

curuinor 4y ago
Also, wrt the specific domain, multiple real estate markets throughout the world are choking to death by the very specific method of no transactions happening, chiefly mainland china but also all throughout the west.
rdm_blackhole 4y ago
Thanks for your comment. I have heard about the book "the mom test" and plan to read it as it 's been recommended quite a few times to me already. I get this post was a long shot but the thread I was referring to got a few answers so I thought why not see what the HN community thinks of this idea? I am assuming that "Go and learn that fact in actual viable ways." means to release it and then go from there. I may just do that in the end. I simply did not want to spend more time than necessary on an idea that may be completely wrong.
- rozenmd 4y ago
  Actually go and read The Mom Test before you build anything else, or try any further customer conversations. It'll save you a ton of time.

mytailorisrich 4y ago

Regarding affordability, I think what most people do is the other way round: You do a bit of homework to see how much you can afford, which gives you a maximum price. After that, "simply seeing a number like $450000" clicks immediately because you just compare that to your max, and that obviously allows you to narrow down your search. In any case, most property portals already have widgets showing estimates of monthly payments. And if they don't and this is a useful feature they'll just add it. Some have features to save properties, etc. (Looks like realestate.com.au is very similar to the main one here in the UK, rightmove.co.uk, and they also seem to have a "renovation estimator") Overall, I think this is a important thing to consider: The features that are not too difficult to implement and integrate in those major property portals, and they will be available for free. So I think the question is not whether the idea has a market (it has one) but whether an independent, paid-for product is viable. If there are none that might tell you something...