Wanted – Gumtree’s map view
Having flat-hunted previously, lately I’ve been flatmate-hunting: searching for a replacement tenant for my room in Highgate, north London. As a rule, during the 5 years I’ve lived in the city, I’ve found finding new flatmates fairly easy; but, since I’ve ended up moving out in the quiet month of January, I’ve been encouraged to get the most out of a few key websites.
Gumtree
Gumtree, ‘the UK’s biggest website for local community classifieds’, has changed a fair bit since I first started using it. I really admired the major redesign that happened (I guess) at some point in 2008: the familiar colour scheme and branding were incorporated into a much smoother experience, preserving the community feel whilst making everything a whole lot easier for the individual – whether posting, buying or selling. As I write it looks like the ‘classic’ Gumtree is again being superseded by a sexier incarnation.
The clean and effective Gumtree UI.
Is Gumtree the last word in classifieds? Sure: you post, the customers/tenants come running. But this time my response rate has been quite low – 2 physical viewings from 300+ hits on the website. Aside from the fact that this is January and the coldest winter for 30 years, and my room doesn’t have a radiator, what could it be?
Map view
I blame the gradual demise of the map view for property searches. Formerly on Gumtree, you could view a Google map displaying as many properties as your search terms allowed, with a little red tree marking each house, flat or garage. You could type in ‘London’ and get literally everything on offer. Admittedly, it used to make Safari go wonky, but it was more useable than not.
[Gumtree should correct me if I'm wrong here, but this is my hunch.] In the redesign, with the advent of monetised customer interactions (like paying £4 to have your ad ‘bumped’ up the listings), the universal map view was replaced by a map that only showed 30 properties per page (by default the top ones in whichever list), leaving the user to click to the next set. Clearly, this privileged the newer posts and incentivised posters to pay that £4 in order to get more hits.
The new Gumtree map view - now with green blobs.
I would like to see Gumtree reinstate the global, un-paged map – because I think it allows greater flexibility of search. Let’s say I wanted to view all properties, however recently posted, in a small area near Hampstead Heath. Instead of being able to zoom the map in and see every property, I would now need to page through 10 or more pages of results before a green blob popped up where I wanted it to. Not only that, but every time I load a new result set, the map zooms right out to accommodate all blobs – from Walthamstow to White City.
Sure, I could make my search terms more precise, but the beauty of the global catch-all map is that you don’t have to refine anything and thus risk missing somewhere that falls just outside of your terms – you just browse.
Globrix
If Globrix did flatshare, they would be my first choice. Theirs is the best property search interface bar none:
- awesomely granular search filters
- global map search (properties pop up as you drag the map)
- draggable price slider
Not to mention an abundance of stats and graphs on individual property pages, which display everything from median house prices in the area to typical crime rates.
Globrix's property map interface - with sliders!
The only problem with Globrix is the trade’s apparent lack of confidence in it. Being a search aggregator, it inevitably takes longer to update than estate agents’ own websites.
Good review. I expect no credit for introducing you to Globrix whatsoever! Although actually – as it’s powered by Fast (now Microsoft owned) real time search for enterprise, as opposed to aggregation in a ‘Find a Property et al’ way – Globrix updates precisely as quickly as participating estate agents (which is the majority now) update their own sites. It functions in exactly the same way as – for eg – The Times Archive, which was launched digitally using Fast software (see similar funky ruler/slider/filter gismo) to providing real time search across its entire digitised content, and results being updated as quickly as The Times uploads new or newly digitised old content. Globrix provides not just a better UI experience, but far superior results experience as well (I’m not on commission from the boys down at Fast, I should add – although food for thought!)
Thanks mate. That’s really interesting about the real time updates. When estate agents explained to me that Find A Property was more up to date than Globrix, I was assuming they knew what they were talking about!
Solid proof that Globrix is awesome.
I suspect that either that individual didn’t get it, or that he/she feared for his future livelihood. If we all had sites and a relationship with Globrix, there’d be precious little need for agents! The major broadcasters shared similar concerns during Project Kangaroo discussions; provide a window for any content creator to get the same distribution/audience using internet search as the established distributor channels, and the distributors are in trouble!