HouseScanner: Motivation

I now have a small family and we live in a small flat in Malmö. We don't plan to live like that forever, and therefore we are looking for houses in the area.

Some of the requirements for the house are:

• Location (not too far from our work locations)
• Price (both a total price and a cost per square meter and per month)
• Local tax rates in the town we want to settle down.

I'm using a spread sheet to keep track of some houses, in order to see a price trend over time and to be able to compare between houses. Until now, I've entered the information manually:

• Date when the add was published
• Address
• Town
• Starting price
• Taxation value
• Number of rooms
• Maintenance costs
• Year the house was built
• Living area
• Other area
• Garden area
• Travel time from my work to the house
• Travel time from my wifes work to the house
• Final price (Updated when the house is sold)
• Contract date (Updated when the house is sold)
• Estimated renovating costs (A guesstimate based on the pictures and text in the ad)
• Calculated monthly costs, both for 2% and 6% interest rates.

Some of the parameters can be fetched automatically. I've marked them in bold.

I use the parameters to estimate a monthly cost, and also a monthly cost per square meter. That cost is calculated as the sum of:

• the monthly cost at an interest rate of 6%
• the estimated need of renovations, multiplied by 4% and divided by 12,
• the estimated increase/decrease in travel time, in terms of minutes per month multiplied by 3
• the changes in local taxes and 
• whether the house is in Lund or not (with a penalty of 2000 SEK if it isn't in Lund). We love Lund and we want to live there!

Fetching all those parameters is a very time consuming task and in the next blog post, I'll try to automate some of them to save time.