The Issue at Hand

Almost every property website on the internet has some form of radial search where you provide a starting point and a radius you wish to search within. In the image above I am looking for a new house within 20 miles of my current home, Chesterfield, Derbyshire.

The image above shows that when I perform my search, I will get results back from anywhere within the red circle. Good. Or maybe not.

The problem lies with the fact that I work in Mansfield (on the right edge of my radius). I will be getting results within 20 miles of Chesterfield, which is fine, but I don't want to move up to 20 miles away from where I work, because frankly I'm not a morning person and I don't want a longer journey to work each day.

I can resolve this by centering my radius on where I work, but if I do that then I'm getting results that are up to 40 miles away from my friends and family, and results which are too near or inside cities, which I don't want either, so I really need to be able to search between the two points.

Until now there hasn't really been a way to do this, let alone easily, but PropertySell is proud to bring you our new Bias Search.

How It Works

It's quite simple really, you just provide the Post Code of your desired location, in my case I'll pick one from Chesterfield.
Then I provide the radius for my search, which in this case is 20miles.
Next I provide my work Post Code, or any Post Code that I wish to search in the direction of.
And finally I click "search" to perform the search.

What the system then does is create the standard radius area around your Post Code, and then works out a radius for your Bias Post Code, and takes the intersection of the two circles, giving you all the properties that are within X miles of your Post Code, but only those that are actually closer to the Bias code you provided.

The image to the right shows the area searched in my particular case.

Alternative Methods

We do not just provide the Bias search, we have a new Area Search which allows you to visually lay out your desired search area using Google Maps. More information on the Area Search.

Limitations of the System

PropertySell are now offering this unique way of finding properties, among other new features such as our bias search and directions. These are all unique to property sell, and all provided free of charge. Because of this we cannot guarantee that the system will work perfectly, there are bound to be bugs that regular use will find, but we do not have the budget to test as thoroughly as we need.

You can help us by providing feedback on the system, reporting any bugs and just letting us know how we can improve the system.

Occasionally properties will be found slightly out of the boundaries you have given, this is due to limitations on the way we can calculate shapes efficiently enough to allow thousands of users to search simultaneously, without waiting 10 minutes for the results to come back.

We can only search properties that have valid Post Codes, the more accurate the Post Codes given for properties, the more accurate the search, we cannot include properties that have not provided a Post Code, so these will not show up in the listing. We recommend you utilize our other search systems as well to make sure you have thoroughly searched each area for all available properties.