Our contribution to the search for housing without intermediaries: the project "Sea in the summer"

The public is indignant

Just today, a post about renting a home , intermediaries who are everywhere, and a website that is designed to fight with them, appeared in the blog "I am promoting".

I read this article and saw that there is genuine interest in the topic from the community. Indeed, all those who had to rent housing for a long or short term, in their own city or on vacation, faced the problem of mediation. It is possible to discuss whether mediation is a problem, but it raises the cost of rent accurately.

Prehistory

So, let's move from theory to practice.
One summer, my friends and I gathered for the first time in our life on our Black Sea coast. And not somewhere, but in Abkhazia. Obviously, the situation with the penetration of the Internet there was deplorable (that was 2008). I, accustomed to finding information on the Internet for a maximum of a few minutes, was discouraged. Information was scarce, and a little more than completely it represented the contacts of intermediaries. Phones of these owners had to tear off on forums and in other dubious places.
I went to have a rest that time, but the desire to change something for the better hid in me.

Formulation of the problem

So, there was a desire to create an open catalog of housing at least on the Black Sea coast, which will collect information on the maximum number of proposals. And most importantly - there will be no mediation model in it. Having picked up the house you like, the user will write down the phone and will be sure that this is the phone of the direct owner.
House information should be detailed, and there should be a lot of photos. And as a geek, I also wanted every house in the catalog to be marked on a fashionable Google map, because the address in an unfamiliar city does not mean anything.
')

Decision

But where to get this amount of content? Of course, it was possible to parse all the information available on the Internet. But it was not enough and it was not at all as complete as I would have liked. And of course there were no direct contacts and geographical coordinates for mapping.
At that moment, we already had a small team of four people and we chose the most low-tech, but the most fruitful way to gather information. Handles.

A group of progressors of two people was formed (led by Gregory , who invented it all), they were equipped with a DSLR, a gps navigator, a laptop, a minimum amount of money for food, and were sent to the sea. In the literal sense of the word - work for food. And for free information on the Internet, of course.
Thus, our team was divided into two groups. Two worked at the front, collecting information. And two more in the rear this information was processed, made a database, wrote a site. It was spring 2009. We wanted to have as many people as possible get access to our information by the beginning of the season, avoiding the headache that tormented us in 2008.

For a couple of months, we collected quite a lot of content in Abkhazia, the Krasnodar Territory and in the Crimea (there are now about 500 records in these regions in the database). But due to the lack of understanding of the site, how to promote it to the beginning of the season on the Internet, I had to redo it into the first non-gaming application in my favorite social network.

Epilogue

June 1, 2009 catalog was opened. People began to use it, homeowners received additional clients, and we weighed ourselves up with the hope of improving karma for services to humanity. It was a crazy feeling of finished work. We traveled all over the coast, took thousands of photos and put hundreds of tags on the navigator. And now it is necessary for someone!

Next was the expansion of the base due to advanced homeowners, who found VKontakte and were ready to add information themselves. By the end of the season, we expanded our geography by adding more exotic India and Thailand, in which we found direct contacts on the Internet.
And then they introduced reviews so that those who returned from the holiday could recommend (or vice versa) the house in which they were and its owners.

And now comes the next holiday season. And again, many will be faced with a lack of information. I hope we helped someone solve the problem.

Link to the VKontakte application
Link for those who do not want to go on VKontakte