Vesen | Property data platform for the UK
It’s been a while since I wrote a post. Sandwiched between some pretty big life-changing events in my personal life.
I’ve also been building Vesen. Which is a property data platform spanning across the UK. So feel free to skip this shameless plug. But if you’re happy to indulge me then read on.
Table of Contents
The premise
Vesen was born mainly out of my own experiences of the property market in the UK. Both as a renter and as a homeowner. I can think of more than one occasion where I moved into a new place, and something I didn’t know about cropped up. Maybe it was inaccessible amenities, or I was being charged more rent than the place was perhaps worth.
I’m not one to dwell on things that have been and gone, but I can certainly think of occasions where I might have made different decisions if I had a more complete picture when it came to a house or a flat I was interested in.
This is where the drive behind Vesen came from.
What is it?
Vesen is a data platform designed to give UK residents more information about the properties they are interested in. Vesen provides a baseline data pack for each property the user searches for. It does this by aggregating a variety of publicly available datasets and presenting them to the user.
This can include things like:
- Where the nearest parks are.
- Where the **nearest schools°° and nurseries are.
- When property ownership changed hands.
- What the crime rates in the local area are.
- Local constituency voting patterns at the last election.
- Average rental prices in that area.
There is also a review feature, which allows users to leave and post reviews. Albeit, these are subject to moderation so we can screen out profanity, names and irrelevant content.
What is next?
The next big thing in terms of development will be to expose the API which backs Vesen and allow people to integrate directly with the API for their own purposes.
Following that I’m looking to enrich the data profile to include more key points. For example:
- Where the nearest ATMs.
- What we calculate your monthly budget would need to be.
- Provide comparisons of crime rates against the average / national rates.
Architecture
I’m planning on doing a follow-up post at some point about the architecture of the system we’ve built. How it works and why we took the decisions that we did.
There were a ton of lessons learned throughout this that might be useful for the next person ranging from:
- SEO challenges with a React Vite SPA (single page application) like Vesen.
- How we kept costs down.
- How we held on to simplicity as a key characteristic of the architecture.
- How we secured various system components.