It’s been a bit quiet here on the Kneedl Blog, but worry not, we’re just completely re-coding the site to combat our speed issues. Hopefully we’ll have some exciting news in the coming week or so.
We’ve been working hard on getting the new data ready for Washington DC, our next city. But we’ve also been making lots of improvements and fixes to the live site.
We know we’ve got some speed issues with the server so we’re working with a development company to get this fixed before we make any PR noise. We also have a bunch of larger scale features we want to add too which should hopefully all come as part of the next release.
Next up we’re headed to an area almost 100% different to Miami, Fl. the home of the Obamas, Washington DC. At the moment we’re researching neighborhoods, taking photos and planning the new site developments.
If you want to be a Featured Realtor, or can help out with neighborhood recommendations, please get in touch.
The folks over at the politically charged ‘Eye on Miami‘ have undertaken some interesting research in the foreclosure figures in Miami.
In the first 4 months of this year we have had 25,577 foreclosures in Miami Dade County. That is almost as many as we had the entire year in 2007 (26,391) and more than 3 times as many as we had the entire year in 2005 (7,829). [...] If we keep up with the current trend, we will close 2009 with more than 75,000 foreclosures.
Miami-Dade could achieve six years worth of foreclosures in just one year. Although we’re assured that the economy is flat-lining and not getting any worse, these figures show that we’re definitely experiencing one of Miami’s real estate bust periods. Yet, even though many of Downtown’s apartments are struggling to fill their vacancies, we’re still building new high rises. I suspect global warming will flood Downtown before it reaches anywhere near capacity.
Read the full article on Eye on Miami
Good news! Kneedl.com is now available in Spanish and English.
On every page you’ll see a new button at the top of the page which allows you to switch between the two languages. Its doesn’t just change the text, we actually recommend different neighborhoods based on this switch. Some neighborhoods in Miami are very popular with the Hispanic community and we’ve reflected this with the language switch.
We are unfortunately not able to bring the APIs and Real Estate content in dual language as they are provided by third parties. We’re working through the whole site to translate all the remaining copy.
I’m going to try and publish regular updates on the tweaks and updates we’ve done to the site. I’m a big fan of ‘fail fast, fail often’ so I’ll be putting features live that may not be perfect, but please give us any feedback so we know if we’re going in the right direction.
This week I’ve mainly been fixing and tweaking:
Kneedl is almost ready to go live. We’re smoothing out a few kinks before we let it loose for feedback. The site aims to help people find the right neighborhood based on their preferences. We’re looking for Miami realtors who would like a bit of free promotion for their services. Leave a comment and we’ll get back to you with details.
It’s been a long time coming, over two years since the first thoughts were put together and the first numbers crunched, but this week build actually started on the Beta version of Kneedl. In the coming weeks we’ll have the site up and running and open it up to all the lovely people who’ve signed up to be part of the beta.
Why a beta? Well, we’re not keen on releasing something to the wilds of the internet without smoothing out the rough edges. We’ve done some closed testing with paper / Omnigraffle prototypes but that was pretty much a proof of concept. Now we’re getting into actual functionality there’s a lot more to think about, a lot more could go wrong, and we want as many diverse eyes on it as possible to give us feedback before we launch.
So far the main headache challenge has been to work out how the dual language support will work. Dual language (in our case Spanish) is key to the product. 40% of first time buyers in Miami were Hispanic in 2008 so we’d be foolish not to be catering to dual languages as well as dual culture. From a development perpective we didn’t want to build it all in English and then hack together some kind of language support after launch. In my experience, post launch ’shoe horned’ features either get put on the wish list for an indeterminate time, or getting canned entirely.
So, in short, some real life PHP is being forged and we’re up and running.
