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And to today, we know which way our bread is buttered. We are ‘big data’ specialists, and our chosen subject is repairs & maintenance in Social Housing. The way we collect, clean, and organise, all our data, from the contract awards to the EPC register, is second to none. So, we built this site to emphasise that.
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Finally, we’ve dropped the Housingnet name from the site. Up until this point we had been using www.housingnet.co.uk as the domain as we worked to move the data and updating the mapping of housing stock. Locarla Properties appeared for the first time – a 4.6M record database of Social Homes matched to their EPC.
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Locarla was born. The domain was originally going to be used for another project, ‘LOw CARbon Landlords’ which was a bit before it’s time, and we needed a .com rather than a .co.uk. We finally settled on a new ‘green’ for the site but there was some pushback from Rangers supporting clients who said it was too ‘Celtic’. We were collecting planning applications then but because there is no central database we had to scrape the data from every Local Authority. The data was interesting, but the effort wasn’t matched by increased income. Our clients want R&M data, they weren’t building houses.
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Tenders & Contracts have arrived! It took us two years to build up our ‘Contracts Team’ and work our way through every R&M notice since 2011, then build the software to deliver an exceptional service.
The design went down well as the data was increasing and the layout was easy to view. The problem was we were still a static information website and not a ‘business tool’ for benchmarking and analysis. The data tables we did display were mainly ‘Top 100’ lists, but we needed to make them more dynamic. From 2017, and for the next 5 years we completely rebuilt the site in Angular and concentrated on enabling clients to use the data rather than just look at it.
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Calling ourselves the ‘Housing Association Data Yearbook’ was harking back to our early days when I was sold on the idea of building a directory of Social Landlords from looking at the NHF ‘Housing Association Financial Yearbook’. For anyone old enough they will remember the Yearbook being found in every office in the country, and multiple copies of it too.
Nothing much has changed on the site except the re-design and the introduction of charts and graphs to spice up the pages a little.
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We had been working on survey methodology for some time on another product and decided to build an online version for Housingnet. It re-invented the STAR survey using complex algorithms for more accurate results. No one was interested. It was the last time we ever built software speculatively.
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Housingnet in 2012 and the birth of our daily housing news email, 'The 60'. It ran every weekday for 12 years, was sent for free, to 21,000 people by the end, and only one person wrote to us in that time. The only time people did write was to complain when we stopped it!
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I liked this version of www.locarla.com (formerly Housingnet), from 2008. The map is in Flash and the banner is our foray into the Care Home Directory business. It didn't last. We stuck with Social Housing.
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Hello MySQL & PHP, we have ourselves a database. I lied about the .exe in an older post, it happened around this time. Because net speeds were slow 'The Address Book', could be downloaded to desktop and would import updates. You can see the ad for '26pigs' which we built to trade in UK Collectibles.
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The previous post was 2004, this is from the following year. We have added Google Adsense as a lot of the content was free, and we had a lot of pages.
Gaz Summer (me), designed every site except 2004. At the time we were also building data management software for other companies.
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The birth of the side bar in 2001, and another stab at logo. You can see how much content there was, over 2500 pages and still curated by one dogged son of a gun in HTML. Each time the design changed, every page had to be updated individually. Gaz is now in Nagpur, has met Ajay, and rented a flat.
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The graphics got a little messed up on web.archive.org for this version from 2000, but I remember at the time, trying to line up all the images in the header table was tricky. We're still on HTML for the site but we had built a .exe so all our data could be accessed from the desktop.
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This is Locarla (formerly known as Housingnet), in 1999. Still using HTML for the whole site of 2300+ pages. Everytime I made a change to the design, I would have to start at page 1 again and make the change to every page in a text editor.
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This is v1.0 of Housingnet.co.uk (later to become Locarla). Built by Gaz Summer in Liverpool, 1997. It was a list of Housing Association addresses called 'The Blue Pages'. I had never sat at a computer before.
