Making our lists work well
In our quest to listen to you and constantly improve our site, we have taken a detailed look at the technology that determines the order of properties in your lists.
Miranda Munn, managing director of NovaLoca, has delved into this subject in detail in recent weeks. “Until I began discussing this in detail with our developers I had no idea how complicated the order of a list of properties was,” she says. No wonder Google has a complex algorithm to decide its search orders!
The best solution when searching for properties on the site is to use NovaLoca’s state-of-the-art maps; however, we are aware that many occupiers choose to view a list as their first (and possibly only) option, so we must make sure that these work really well too.
Having listened to your comments, we want to present properties in the order that will make most sense to occupiers when they are looking for property. To give you an idea of how hard we are working to achieve this, we have been looking at the following areas.
In a standard search, we take the centre point of the location that an occupier specifies and show them properties (matching the other criteria they have specified) in order of their distance from this location, with the closest property first. The occupier is also shown the distance of each property from the centre of the location they have specified. In most cases, this is the fairest and most straight-forward way to order a list from a standard search, but a few problems do crop up from time to time.
Problem: When an occupier chooses a location that covers a large area, such as Manchester (for example, entering a search for “offices” in “Manchester”), properties that happen to be located close to the centre will be listed first.
An occupier might lose patience if they had to scroll down a list that did not necessarily show the most relevant properties first, for example if the occupier actually wanted properties in the North of Manchester rather than the centre.
Solutions:
1. We are planning to break down large towns into areas, to allow occupiers to see the most appropriate properties first (such as “West” London & “North” Manchester).
2. We now show 25 property listings on a page instead of 10, so occupiers will have to scroll through fewer pages to find more properties.
3. We are also considering offering a map when occupiers choose a large area location, so that they can pinpoint an exact place for the centre of their search.
Problem: When an occupier enters a town/city name that appears in more than one location, we offer the possible counties (in a drop-down list) for them to specify the correct area. However, if the searcher doesn’t scroll down to select a county, the one at the top of the list is automatically selected. As counties are listed in alphabetic order, the village known as Leeds in Kent comes above the rather larger Leeds in West Yorkshire. This can produce unexpected results!
Solutions:
1. We have changed these orders in many cases, so that the largest town/city appears first on the list.
2. We also now have the ability to change quickly any order for new examples such as the one above, so if you know of any please tell us and we can improve the search order just for you!
Problem: You can search by town, county or postcode area on NovaLoca; however, some areas do not come under these categories. Salford Quays, for example, is not a town or official location under these terms. However, occupiers are likely to want to search using this or other “area” names.
Solutions:
1. If NovaLoca does not recognise a location name, it will carry out an address keyword search. This means that all properties with “Salford Quays”, for example, within their address, will be presented in a list. This facility can also be used for searching for other address fields, such as building or street names.
2. We are also now able to add descriptive areas and specify a central latitude & longitude to go with them – we can in effect add “new locations” to searches, perhaps local names for parts of suburbs or other such areas. Do let us know if there are terms like this that you think it would be useful to add.
Problem: The irregular nature of postcode areas means that it is possible to do a search with a centre point in one postcode, e.g. W4, and find properties in the results that are in a neighbouring area, e.g. W6, but still closer to the centre point of the search than some W4 properties. An occupier, assuming that they will see first in the list all properties that match their chosen postcode area, may not actually see what they expect to find. They may think they have exhausted their search in the first postcode when this is not the case.
We need to offer postcodes grouped together but still order properties by distance. However, we can’t just order by postcode, because in a search that included properties over a very wide area, those that came up first alphabetically (such as Aberdeen, which has an AB postcode) would always be listed higher, gaining an unfair advantage but also not necessarily being what an occupier was looking for.
Solution: We hope that by presenting 25 properties per page instead of 10, enabling occupiers to scroll quickly through more properties, this problem will be limited. However, we are continuing to look at solutions to this problem and your comments are welcome.
In the meantime, you can choose to order your own search by many criteria (viewing newest additions first, for example) and we would always recommend our map as the best way to get a really good overview of locations.
If you have any comments or suggestions about search orders, or anything else on our site, they are always most welcome, and you may find that the site evolves further based on your suggestions.
by Miranda Munn
