Archive for September 2011

The Demand On The Housing and Apartment Market

By on September 26, 2011

The demand for housing is different depending on several factors like the median income followed by the available credit, buyers preferences, investor preferences, and cost of all aspects involved. It stands to reason that an area experiencing an economic boom will have more that are looking for housing, either to buy or rent. Other considerations have to take into account the size of the families (number of children), the age of the family, US citizens or immigrates. Plus factors that will directly impact the demand in an area are also the number of divorces, deaths, marriages, double income homes, etc.

All these things will depend on the actual demand of the Beverly Hills furnished apartments or Denver Apartments market in any area. One thing is certain, people will need a place to live. But determining if it’s an area that would be an investors dream (where the need for rental property is high) or for the home owners (better neighborhoods, more affluent lifestyles, etc.) helps to know what type of housing is needed and wanted.

The level of income in any area really determines fully the housing market. If an area has a good economy, the level of income is higher, housing demands would be more for home owners. This would be a good area for investors who want to develop residential areas to sell. Or for individual buyers to claim their homes. Real estate in these areas tend to be more valued. The occasional investor may hit upon a few rental properties, but this would be more for the owners.

Investors do well to look in areas where rental properties are desired. Areas where there may be young families just starting out. Areas where the jobs aren’t top-end, but more so people will be working and moving on after a time. Or areas high in immigration, where the demand is great for immediate housing, but the resources aren’t available for these to buy.

This entry is filed under Real Estate.

jQuery geographical data autocompleter in Rails

By on September 12, 2011

In Wadomo, we enforce writting reusable code when possible. This means that we can use it in our future projects, but also that all the developers out there can use it and improve it at the same time. Win-win situation that has been the base for the open source community since the early days.

A common problem that arises within web projects is how to save geographical data about our users. We always like to know where users are located, so we can target them with more localized information and recommendations.

Our goal was to easily add this information in our views, and to be able to have an autocomplete field with all the cities in the world with just one html tag, simple and clean.

Long time ago, we used to create big, annoying and unmaintainable relational tables in our databases, trying to solve this problem. Now, we can use some of the online services that companies like Google or Yahoo offers. After testing some of these services, we decided to use Yahoo Geo and we are very pleased about the obtained results.

To make our life easier, we have developed a Ruby on Rails plugin, and of course you can use it too! This plugin will include jQuery in your project (if you haven’t done it yet) so please make sure that you are not using Prototype, because it could create conflicts with your code.

The first thing that you have to do is register yourself in Yahoo Geo for an API_KEY. After that, you’re ready to install our plugin.

Using a console, go to your rails app dir and type:

script/plugin install git://github.com/wadomo/geo_yahoo.git

Now, check if  you have included the default javascript files in your layout. If don’t, include this line in your views layaout:

<%= javascript_include_tag :defaults %>

The last thing, is add your API_KEY in your config/environment.rb file. Be sure that you include this line just before the last “end” of the file.

ENV['YAHOO_API'] = “yourapikeyhere”

That’s it! You’ve got it!

This entry is filed under Tech.