Property map for Nehnutelnosti.sk

It is usually good practice to show a map when dealing with location-dependent data. However, the biggest real estate portal in Slovakia, nehnutelnosti.sk, does not do this¹.

So I built one myself: https://vokracko.cz/nehnutelnosti.sk

Originally I built it for myself, but I thought it might be useful for others as well.

Background 🔗

Recently I’ve been spending some of my time in Slovakia. I frequent an area where a lot of new buildings are being constructed. I found interesting that non-negligible percentage of the newly constructed buildings remained unoccupied for a long time. Naturally, I wondered why they might be empty and for how much are they being sold advertised? Not that I’d want to purchase anything, just out of curiosity.

The most popular real estate portal in Slovakia seems to be nehnutelnosti.sk. So that’s where I went to take a look. But to my surprise, the webside does not have a map view¹.

I, a Czech accustomed to sReality.cz and their excellent map view, was baffled. I wanted to see the properties sold in Slovakia on a map as well - to see the houses on the streets that I drive by, not just as a boring list of addresses.

But I couldn’t. What would any reasonable person with busy schedule do?

Build it

Here are some technical details:

• Python & FastAPI for backend
• Nominatim for geocoding
• Openstreetmap for map rendering

How it works 🔗

The backend scrapes the provided URL (and all subsequent pages) for all property listings. It parses out the address, price, size and link to the listing, translates the addresses using nominatim to lat/lon coordinates and renders them on a map.

The parsed results are cached in memory for 24 hours to:

• avoid making too many requests on nehnutelnosti.sk
• provide faster response times for subsequent requests for the same URL

What I found surprising is that A LOT of the listings do not have a full address filled. Sometimes it is only a city, sometimes it has a street but no house number. Sometimes it is completely wrong, pointing to a different city / village, based on what the detailed description says.