5 ms·

I looked for a flat in London twice in the past year so I've felt the pain and would love to find something that makes the process easier. I'm not sure you're a

by MehdiEG 14y ago

I looked for a flat in London twice in the past year so I've felt the pain and would love to find something that makes the process easier. I'm not sure you're addressing the true pain points though. What I found to be truly nightmarish when looking for a flat was: 1) The immense majority of flats listed on rental sites (either aggregators or the letting agencies sites) are either scams, have already been rented or are just baits that letting agencies publish just to get you to ring them so that they can try to sell you the flats they actually have available. The result if that pretty much all the online rental listing websites and apps are nothing more than a spectacular waste of time as every time you find something that looks decent, it's either already gone, it's a scam or it was never available in the first place. 2) In a place like London, the rent is only one part of what a flat costs you. Council tax, charges and agency fees are massive and can easily add 20%-40% to the cost of your flat. And these charges can vary a lot from one place to another. Yet, no site ever displays the total cost of a flat. This makes it really hard to compare flats. To address the first point, I always thought that charging both landlords to advertise and tenant to look for flats would cut a lot of the crap. Landlords should only be able to advertise for a maximum of 3 days (they could pay again to extend for another 3 days). Since tenants have to pay to see the listings, landlords shouldn't get harassed by time wasters. Having to pay to advertise should hopefully keep the scammers at bay. And since landlords have to make the effort to renew and pay every 3 days, it should hopefully reduce the amount of flat still listed but already gone. Of course, it's likely that scammers and letting agencies would quickly find a way around this - but it'd be worth trying. Might not be your space right now since you seem to be focusing on aggregating from existing sites. But if you want to add real value, I really think you need to re-think the way rental sites operate. (as a side note, the only rental site in London I've found not to be a big fat waste of time is http://london.spareroom.co.uk/ http://london.spareroom.co.uk/ - pay for access to the latest listings and you generally find genuine and good offers that are still available. And it's not just rooms in shared houses - there are actually quite a lot of flats to rent there as well)

thlt 14y ago
Dear MehdiEG, thanks a bunch for pointing them out. 1) We are indeed trying to solve this problem, our approach is collaboration amongst house hunters. Users who found scam/expired properties can report them, then other won't find it. We also intend to integrate AI in this problem. Pls Keep an eye on this ;)
- MehdiEG 14y ago
  If you can fix this problem, you've got a goldmine in your hands. Never mind the map, simply knowing that the flats you're looking at are actually real would completely change the experience (the map is very handy though - keep it of course).
  - thlt 14y ago
    I think you nailed it. Definitely the way to go.
- jtheory 14y ago
  Thanks for this; I'm in the early stages of looking in Cambridge, have never lived in the UK before whatsoever, and had no idea (yet) of the low quality of the listings on rightmove, etc.. [Side note: current coverage is London, Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Nottingham, Bristol, Newcastle, Leeds, Edinburgh and Glasgow... any idea when Cambridge might be added to the mix?] One thing I've noticed in scanning different sites is that the data at the source is often quite limited, possibly intentionally. The different sites have the same limited info; and I'm fairly sure the reason you don't have searches based on "children allowed" or "pets allowed" is because this isn't recorded reliably (or in any way consistently)... it's just occasionally in the text description, worded however (possibly with spelling errors). As long as you're aggregating the same limited data, there's only so far you can go. Input from searchers could be the way out -- like the idea of letting users flag scam properties, or add other info after talking with the agent -- but this may get hard to protect from abuse, frustratingly.
thlt 14y ago
2) That's absolutely true. We are at the moment like Google for rent and not controlling the data. When the users can post ad on our platform, we definitely notice this point.
cjrp 14y ago
#1 - ABSOLUTELY. Having recently moved in London, my first approach was to search sites like RightMove, etc. and create a little spreadsheet of 15 properties we'd shortlisted. After calling each estate agent, not a single property was actually available. Incredibly frustrating. edit: Also regarding charges, parking data (whether it's included, or if not how much is an on-street permit from the council, etc.) would be great!
- thlt 14y ago
  yup this needs to be taken seriously.
  - cjrp 14y ago
    It's great that reporting a listing as expired hides it from your map - most sites offer "add to favourite" but what I usually want is to remove things I'm not interested in and see what's left. Maybe a way to do that without going as far as reporting the listing would be good?
    - thlt 14y ago
      yup additionally our robots check all the listings very often, even though they might still miss out some of them.
dazbradbury 14y ago
Without wanting to hijack this thread - and detract from the good work of the OP - this is exactly what we are trying to fix with our startup, OpenRent (http://www.openrent.co.uk http://www.openrent.co.uk). 1. All of our listings are live. There is a big fat RENT NOW button on the listing pages...! 2. All of our charges are transparent - if you use Rent now - we charge tenants £20 each for referencing. For listing - we charge £20. The other costs associated with rentals (bills breakdown based on no. of bedrooms / council tax / etc.. ) we will be adding in - it's on our TODO list. Anyway, as I said, I don't want to detract from the OP's work. The search side is also an important one to solve (ie. our commute time search), but we feel in order to do that effectively, you need to build out the listing quality first.
- thlt 14y ago
  nice to see another tool to search for properties, however hijacking is always not a good way to advertise your service - to be honest.

by MehdiEG 14y ago

thlt 14y ago

Dear MehdiEG, thanks a bunch for pointing them out. 1) We are indeed trying to solve this problem, our approach is collaboration amongst house hunters. Users who found scam/expired properties can report them, then other won't find it. We also intend to integrate AI in this problem. Pls Keep an eye on this ;)

MehdiEG 14y ago
If you can fix this problem, you've got a goldmine in your hands. Never mind the map, simply knowing that the flats you're looking at are actually real would completely change the experience (the map is very handy though - keep it of course).
- thlt 14y ago
  I think you nailed it. Definitely the way to go.
jtheory 14y ago
Thanks for this; I'm in the early stages of looking in Cambridge, have never lived in the UK before whatsoever, and had no idea (yet) of the low quality of the listings on rightmove, etc.. [Side note: current coverage is London, Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Nottingham, Bristol, Newcastle, Leeds, Edinburgh and Glasgow... any idea when Cambridge might be added to the mix?] One thing I've noticed in scanning different sites is that the data at the source is often quite limited, possibly intentionally. The different sites have the same limited info; and I'm fairly sure the reason you don't have searches based on "children allowed" or "pets allowed" is because this isn't recorded reliably (or in any way consistently)... it's just occasionally in the text description, worded however (possibly with spelling errors). As long as you're aggregating the same limited data, there's only so far you can go. Input from searchers could be the way out -- like the idea of letting users flag scam properties, or add other info after talking with the agent -- but this may get hard to protect from abuse, frustratingly.

thlt 14y ago

2) That's absolutely true. We are at the moment like Google for rent and not controlling the data. When the users can post ad on our platform, we definitely notice this point.

cjrp 14y ago

#1 - ABSOLUTELY. Having recently moved in London, my first approach was to search sites like RightMove, etc. and create a little spreadsheet of 15 properties we'd shortlisted. After calling each estate agent, not a single property was actually available. Incredibly frustrating. edit: Also regarding charges, parking data (whether it's included, or if not how much is an on-street permit from the council, etc.) would be great!

thlt 14y ago
yup this needs to be taken seriously.
- cjrp 14y ago
  It's great that reporting a listing as expired hides it from your map - most sites offer "add to favourite" but what I usually want is to remove things I'm not interested in and see what's left. Maybe a way to do that without going as far as reporting the listing would be good?
  - thlt 14y ago
    yup additionally our robots check all the listings very often, even though they might still miss out some of them.

dazbradbury 14y ago

Without wanting to hijack this thread - and detract from the good work of the OP - this is exactly what we are trying to fix with our startup, OpenRent (http://www.openrent.co.uk http://www.openrent.co.uk). 1. All of our listings are live. There is a big fat RENT NOW button on the listing pages...! 2. All of our charges are transparent - if you use Rent now - we charge tenants £20 each for referencing. For listing - we charge £20. The other costs associated with rentals (bills breakdown based on no. of bedrooms / council tax / etc.. ) we will be adding in - it's on our TODO list. Anyway, as I said, I don't want to detract from the OP's work. The search side is also an important one to solve (ie. our commute time search), but we feel in order to do that effectively, you need to build out the listing quality first.

thlt 14y ago
nice to see another tool to search for properties, however hijacking is always not a good way to advertise your service - to be honest.