What it does

All house prices website was finally released a few days ago. It shows the sold prices of residential properties in England and Wales since 1995. The sales are held and published free for commercial use by the UK’s Land Registry.

I have been thinking about the site for a long time, and I am happy it’s now out there. There are quite a few other sites (with million of monthly visitors) that offer similar service, so let’s see how we do.

A Ruby on Rails project

The web application is a simple Rails project (what else, right?). I use PostgreSql as database and no turbolinks (even though I like turbolinks). There’s no custom JavaScript on the site at the moment. The styling is minimalistic, but we’ll get more in details about that on a future post. It currently sits on $10 droplet by Digital Ocean, as the $5 one was running out of memory.

Where to find the data

As I said above, the data comes from Land Registry. We only hold England and Wales property information at the moment, but we would like to add Scotland as well.

Google

The website was submitted to Google a few days ago, and the robots have been indexing the pages since. So far there are around 200 allhouseprices.com pages indexed. SEO will be a big part of the site’s maintenance, so I’ll be documenting here my next steps.