Launch of new website/app. Dwellist. Blog post by Jimmy Loughran

With the support of the Open Data Engagement Fund 2017/2018, I was able to research, design and build Dwellist - an app (for iPhone (link: https://itunes.apple.com/app/id1410855909), Android (link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dwellist.dwellist) https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dwellist.dwellist and the web (link: http://dwellist.ie/) that helps home owners research areas before buying property.

Buying a home in Ireland can be a frustrating experience, especially the current climate, with housing stock falling short of demand. As a result, many buyers are looking outside of areas they are familiar with.

As part of the house-hunting process, tasks are often repeated; looking up planning applications, property websites and the property price register to compare prices, and scouring the web for information on new developments or changes to zoning in the area.

While most of this information is freely available on the web, it’s either poorly formatted, unintuitive, or difficult to find.

Dwellist aims to help buyers to research all of these things in one place.

What you can look up:

Currently, between the web and mobile versions of the app, users can find these data sets:

• Neighbourhood information: Census information, displayed in small areas.
• Recorded crimes: This data set shows types of crimes, crime rates and trends over time.
• Property prices: Latest, and historical median property prices for any eircode in Ireland.
• Noise: Traffic noise data is available in certain Dublin areas, on the Dwellist website.

Coming soon:

Dwellist will continue to add different data sets to its offering, aiming to make the data presented more specific, and more useful for house hunters.

In addition what’s available currently, the following data sets will be added to Dwellist over the coming months:

• Planning applications: Look up planning applications based on location, and find out whether they were accepted or rejected.
• Zoning: Local area plans and development plans

I also hope to release a simple API, based on the work completed for Dwellist. This will allow users to return different data sets based on latitude and longitude values.

Feedback:

An important part of building Dwellist was listening, and responding to user feedback. If you’ve tried that app and have any suggestions, feel free to contact jimmy@dwellist.ie