I do feel like one of the main disadvantages of Sydney over London is that it's 3411 miles from the nearest "national" park, instead of 3074 miles away.
Other than the "national" park comparison and non metric units, I was pleasantly surprised that I could add non-US cities. However it feels pretty surface level. Comparing Sydney and London, all I can really deduce is that Sydney is sunnier and more rainy, but there's nothing about what it feels like to live there.
Would I feel happier? What are the cultural differences? What is the food like? What sort of social groups thrive in the cities? What's public transport like? What's commuting like? What's tourism like?
Haha yeah, that needs some refinement! Ultimately it's a restriction of the API's we're using now.
"Would I feel happier? What are the cultural differences? What is the food like? What sort of social groups thrive in the cities? What's public transport like? What's commuting like? What's tourism like?"
These are all great suggestions, and some are on the roadmap. One thing is we never want to get in the game of saying one place is "Better" or "Worse" than another. We just want to provide data and let people decide what's important.
These are really important questions when evaluating a place to live. The point about “tourism” is somehow covered by mentioning the nearest national park—unfortunately only in the US, which leads to Arcadia National Park for all European locations. In times of endless possibilities for AI-driven data and meta-analysis, this seems all the more poorly done and unimaginative.
This is an early Alpha and we actually were considering locking it down to the US initially but I think it's important to get out there early and expose problems like this. All valid points.
100%, we want to add that but the data is expensive. If this has legs we will probably spring for Zillow or Redfin API access.
We actually hit a rate limit with the image API tonight, but we're caching everything we pull into a DB, so the more people use it, the less we'll have to rely on API calls.
You could probably just write a basic scraper for local real estate listing sites for each of the popular cities, and calculate summary statistics + month-on-month changes in rent/prices.
No need for expensive real estate APIs.
I used to use https://nomads.com/ a lot (even though I didn't fully trust the prices)...just an indicator of rough housing costs is usually enough (in my case).
We want to add home prices and rent, but that is really expensive data unfortunately. If this has legs, we may be able to justify paying for the Zillow API or something similar. We do plan on adding affiliate links to realtors in that city, although that's not nearly as helpful.
There's also an entire "Explore" section of this site we're working on once the database reaches a higher level of maturity. We want to do all the filtering you're mentioning.
Other than the "national" park comparison and non metric units, I was pleasantly surprised that I could add non-US cities. However it feels pretty surface level. Comparing Sydney and London, all I can really deduce is that Sydney is sunnier and more rainy, but there's nothing about what it feels like to live there.
Would I feel happier? What are the cultural differences? What is the food like? What sort of social groups thrive in the cities? What's public transport like? What's commuting like? What's tourism like?
"Would I feel happier? What are the cultural differences? What is the food like? What sort of social groups thrive in the cities? What's public transport like? What's commuting like? What's tourism like?"
These are all great suggestions, and some are on the roadmap. One thing is we never want to get in the game of saying one place is "Better" or "Worse" than another. We just want to provide data and let people decide what's important.
Thanks for giving it a spin!
And something like Hoodmaps to discern safe/unsafe suburbs in a city (quality of life differs a lot within a city, often more than between cities)
We actually hit a rate limit with the image API tonight, but we're caching everything we pull into a DB, so the more people use it, the less we'll have to rely on API calls.
No need for expensive real estate APIs.
I used to use https://nomads.com/ a lot (even though I didn't fully trust the prices)...just an indicator of rough housing costs is usually enough (in my case).
There's also an entire "Explore" section of this site we're working on once the database reaches a higher level of maturity. We want to do all the filtering you're mentioning.
Great comment, thanks!