6 ms·

Show HN: Properties to rent - No agent fees, no dead listings, no risk

58 points by dazbradbury 14y ago

ianpri 14y ago
Great site and as mentioned before, an industry ripe for the picking. One thing that would be great is if zooming out on the map increased the search distance on the results - searched for Leytonstone (no results) and scanned around/zoomed out looking for other properties.
kgogolek 14y ago
really nice site. UK needs something tool like this, especially in this market. The agent fees are ridic. Good luck with your project!
- dazbradbury 14y ago
  Co-Founder here. Thanks for your comments. We've already helped tenants and landlords save tens of thousands of pounds, now we're just looking to scale up and help even more!
  - sdoering 14y ago
    Something like this would have helped me tremendously, when I came to Hamburg, Germany nearly 4 years ago. I really love the idea and hope, that this will spread. how do you keep agents out? what if the register as owners? agent-fees are a pain - not only in the UK. So hope someday you will make the internationalization-jump.
    - dazbradbury 14y ago
      We have a few systems in place to stop agents, and have had to make the decision to delist many properties based on this. I don't want to elaborate too much and help agents circumvent our systems, but essentially there isn't too much motivation for agents to list. We advertise as having no agent fees, and as such, it breaks the agents model of charging fees. This disincentivises most agents. Furthermore, tenants don't want to pay fees when they find out they don't have to...
      - Datonomics 14y ago
        Just curious, how do agent fees normally work in London?
        dazbradbury 14y ago
        For a "tenant find" service, agents normally charge landlords between 5% and 15% of the annual rent. They will then add on charges for deposit handling, contract drafting, referencing, etc... All fixed charges at the £30-£150 mark each. To tenants, agents will charge similar fees, normally in the region of hundreds of pounds. This will cover referencing and general "admin". It is these fees we are combating against - and will hopefully be able to eradicate. Agents will also offer a "fully managed service" for between 5% and 15% of the rent per month, but that is not something we're tackling at the moment...
        sdoering 14y ago
        Thanks for your elaborate answers. here in Germany the fees are sometimes in the range of 1 - 2 monthly rates. The last one is the maximum allowed value by law. But, as you have to pay a damage deposit to your new landlord as well, this might add up in cost around 5 monthly rents. OK, if everything goes well, the damage deposit returns to your valet, once you move again, but that is a lot of money to have at hand upfront. So a service like this will help a lot of people - as said before.
        Datonomics 14y ago
        It's amazing that a system like that has lasted. Good luck to you!
  - com 14y ago
    Someone should enter the market with a product like this in the Randstad in the Netherlands, focussing on Amsterdam and The Hague. The number of new foreigners who aren't able to access the subsidized rental market every year is in the tens of thousands, and the letting agents here charge ridiculous amounts for no apparent service to owners or tenants.
alexchamberlain 14y ago
I'm looking for a flat in London at the moment; I want a 1 bedroom flat, but not a studio flat. You can't search for that using your UI.
- dazbradbury 14y ago
  Noted - we added studio / flat share options very recently, and just need to update the search page. Will add that to our short-term TODO list!
  - NickPollard 14y ago
    Just to add a second to this, when I was last flat hunting some 5 months ago this was a huge problem for me online - searching for '1-bed' would show me studios and flatshares when all I was interested in was a proper 1-bed flat. Glad to hear you're working on it, I've bookmarked you for the next time I move.
  - mietek 14y ago
    Please make sure searching for 1-bed apartments does not show studios and flatshares. This is absolutely infuriating on many other sites.
    - alexchamberlain 14y ago
      I have to agree; it has to be the most frustrating part of looking for a flat. Another thing I hate is no plan. Pictures are great, but without a plan it's really hard to imagine how big (small) rooms are.
    - wattson12 14y ago
      This is a great point. I'm looking for a 1 bed place in London at the moment. I don't mind a studio, but showing flat shares when I have put a maximum of 1 bedroom in the filter is very annoying (looking at you, rightmove)
dailygrind 14y ago
Excellent domain and the website also looks nice. Can you give us some background about the technology used?
- dazbradbury 14y ago
  Thanks! Sure - we're a .Net (MVC) back-end, running on Appharbor (those guys have been awesome). Hopefully we can handle the HN-Effect we're currently experiencing...
  - nopassrecover 14y ago
    Interested to see how Appharbor goes. I've been using a .NET MVC-based setup to achieve a similar thing here in Aus (for friends only currently as I've been relying on scraping for data). Really impressed with your customer dev efforts by the way.
r4vik 14y ago
Good stuff @dazbradbury, you've got 100x more inventory than the last time I looked, how did you pull it off? Big partnership or have you started scraping (doesn't look like it)?
- dazbradbury 14y ago
  Nope - have just been getting out there and speaking to landlords. Marketing has been our main focus, and will continue to be as we grow. No scraping as we want to ensure our properties are all live and we have a relationship (albeit a digital one) with our landlords. It also means we can add a lot of value.
  - chris_wot 14y ago
    Fellas, when are you releasing in Australia?!?
rheide 14y ago
I love it! Estate agents in London are a royal pain. If this gets rid of them I will be extremely grateful. You are improving the world, sir. Suggestion: some (most) apartments require users to give references. How about allowing users to verify themselves on the site so they don't have to provide references for properties they want to rent. Could include some warranty service for people posting apartments that make use of this arrangement. (tl;dr: make it more like airbnb).
- dazbradbury 14y ago
  Thanks! Our aim is most certainly to save tenants and landlords vast sums of money, as well as improve the rental market itself. We've already helped tenants and landlords save tens of thousands of pounds, but we're definitely not stopping there. If the result is letting agents being eradicated, then I don't think many people will be too upset! Regarding references - this is something we would definitely work towards. Ideally we could verify enough information digitally that landlords don't ask for the further references, but right now we don't have the capital to offer the warranty. For now, we just make references much cheaper (£20), rather than paying an agency hundreds of pounds.
volpav 14y ago
I like it. My 2 cents regarding the UI: 1. Labels under the filter area look like buttons, I always want to click one of them :-) 2. The "sticky" top with map and filters and the scrolling list at the bottom I think not the best UX decision. I have a relatively small screen (1028x1024) and I almost don't see the list. Maybe the solution would be to be able to collapse the filters and map (and bring the map by clicking on the map icon from the listing).
- volpav 14y ago
  One more thing: it seems like the filters area sometimes overlays the footer (on my screen) so I'm not able to click any of the links at the bottom before the cursor reaches the (imaginary) border between filters and list.
vladoh 14y ago
I really like the interface - very clear and simple. I wish I had something like this for Munich, where the search for apartments is really a nightmare. What are your plans for expanding your service?
VBprogrammer 14y ago
This appears to be a UK based site so why on earth are the distance units in Kilometres?
- dazbradbury 14y ago
  I get this a lot - I guess it was one of my americanisms coming through when writing the front end (I lived in the states for a few years), as well as a preference for working in KM. Essentially, it's on the TODO list to be updated.
  - wtvanhest 14y ago
    We don't use KMs in the US either.
- justincormack 14y ago
  Because we are metric in the Uk. What's more odd is distances from London for things in London. Presumably from some bogus centre.
  - kirchhoff 14y ago
    Not in all cases. Distances of such length are almost always measured in miles here.
    - buro9 14y ago
      Only because of road signage and a failure to complete the move to metric. I tend to use both miles and KM. Miles in the car, KM on the bicycle. I understand and can visualise what a KM is better than what a mile is though.
  - VBprogrammer 14y ago
    Distances and speeds on our road system are always measured in miles. As such most British people generally have a much stronger intuition of Miles than they do Kilometres (except strangely runners who quite often use Kilometres).
Silhouette 14y ago
Sounds like a great idea to me. The rental market here in Cambridge is always fairly vibrant for the size of the city, but the agencies don't seem to make many friends with either landlords or tenants. I expect you could make a very tidy profit (and a lot of friends :-)) disrupting their market! It's probably quite seasonal in a place like this, but on the flip side, if you could land a good deal with the universities to help place all their living-out students, that might be worth a quid or two.
anovikov 14y ago
Why is almost all housing in London so shitty? It was my big shock when i first came there. Almost all except the very top of the market (over 2000GBP per week, and there are few flats that expensive) appear so terrible... Is that only London or all of the country is like that? Why? Something like tax laws making it prohibitive to renovate housing? Why there is still a lot of 100+ years old rotten houses in London, definitely bearing no historical significance, their planning clearly showing they were build before electricity? I was very surprised since i came from a country many times poorer than the U.K. and yet the housing stock looks so much better there.
- barking 14y ago
  I prefer older houses, they're usually better soundproofed for starters and have higher ceilings and sash windows which provide better ventilation. The high cost in London is simply because of the demand.
  - anovikov 14y ago
    I am not complaining about the costs, that is okay. But overwhelming majority of housing is in really terrible condition, the one that covers almost all of the market except the very top. Other places i used to live in, those with 20-50% of U.K.'s per capita GDP, have much better housing, new and old one.
    - barking 14y ago
      Well if you can afford housing in London then maybe you were at the very top of the market in other countries? I left London partly so I could afford to live in a nicer house. I'd imagine it's a similar story in places like Hong Kong, Singapore, New York.
    - NickPollard 14y ago
      As someone living in London, I would generally agree with this - compared to a lot of places, London does seem to have a lot of housing in quite bad repair. To take a wild guess why, I would suggest two factors: 1) The housing stock is old compared to a lot of places, so much of it needs modernization and renovation 2) The lack of space to expand (plus restrictions on greenfield developments) means new housing is limited, so there is not much competition to existing landlords. Why spend thousands of £ on upgrading your property if you can leave it as it is and still charge high rents?
lhnz 14y ago
Great, but I'm looking for a flat share. Do you do those?
- sdfjkl 14y ago
  I see lots of flat shares listed, but there doesn't seem to be a filter for them, which would be useful.
cheza 14y ago
Great site! FYI, you have a small typo on the FAQ page: "OpenRent are here to ease the administrative burdon and reduce costs." Should be "burden"
- dazbradbury 14y ago
  Good spot, and thanks for telling us! Have updated it for inclusion in our next release (once we've ridden the HN wave.)
retube 14y ago
Here's why a landlord will pay a reputable estate agent a 10% fee. They will: - market the property on places like rightmove, findaproperty etc - show prospective tenants around (so you don't have to take time off work) - take pictures, measurements and construct floor plans - do credit, CRB and reference checks - provide a boilerplate tenancy agreement (which you can amend as you like) - sort out posting of deposits to the Tenancy Deposit Scheme - collect the rent The amount of time and hassle all this saves is a lot... Of course there are crummy agents so do your research. Incidently - your "no risk" claim is a worrying one and suggests you don't know much about the lettings business.
- dazbradbury 14y ago
  Here's what OpenRent offers (take a look here: http://www.openrent.co.uk/landlords http://www.openrent.co.uk/landlords): - We'll market the property on places like rightmove, findaproperty etc - We'll do credit, CRB and reference checks - We'll provide a boilerplate tenancy agreement (which you can amend as you like), AND we'll provide a digital agreement for online signatures. - We'll sort out posting of deposits to the Tenancy Deposit Scheme - We'll tell tenants where and when to pay the rent. ie. A standing order into the landlord's bank account, but we don't collect it as such. What we don't do: - The viewings. Obviously this is a huge cost saving that we can pass onto the tenants and landlords, but also, tenants like meeting the landlord, and landlords like meeting their prospective tenants. Who better to show you round?
  - mijail 14y ago
    Super good looking site! From my understanding you are an agent that does everything except the showing. I think your last point is kind of key and may need to be fleshed out more. I agree that tenants like meeting the landlord, however, landlord may like meeting tenants but they usually are unable to. Landlords are in the business of owning property. They use a service provider like brokers to make their life more convenient, so they can focus on the core of their business. The first few points are administrative tasks the real burden is to schedule appointments and show up for appointments that are usually a waste of time (that's why brokers are bitter!)Perhaps facilitating the different aspect of these appointments for landlords can help disrupt the status quo.
stef25 14y ago
Looks very nice, I love these type of real estate projects. I've heard before that agencies in the UK are a royal pain, but surely this isn't the first website that tried to bypass them. What sets this one apart?
stef25 14y ago
On your site it says "our service now includes: Listing on our site as well as Rightmove, Zoopla, FindaProperty, Globrix, PrimeLocation and more to advertise your property to millions of high quality tenants". Does this mean that a posting on your site also appears on those portals? If so, how do you do this technically?
- dazbradbury 14y ago
  That is correct - the major portals have various data feeds for accepting property listings from agents. We can use those to list as we are ourselves registered agents - just much more affordable ones!
twelvechairs 14y ago
To provide a bit of constructive criticism, I don't think your front page (the real front page, not the link here) describes quickly and clearly what exactly you do. I sort of assumed it was just direct contact between landlord and tenant (like moveflat, gumtree, craigslist, etc.) and went straight into searching. The only indication of the other side of what you do (a streamlined version of some, but not all of a traditional lettings agent's services) is in the 'for landlords' box (for the very few who read that far down), or in the 'learn more' pages. I want to know the whole process of what I'm in for (as a prospective tenant or landlord) - i think you definitely need to flag this side of things to your users right at the top of the front page. Also - the word 'open' might have thrown me, as I guess I was expecting from the name something a bit more free and user-curated rather than a service-driven company. [edit] that said - I think what you are doing is great and I'd love to see this kind of streamlined and professional service without a huge cost take over alot of the business of traditional agents.
- dazbradbury 14y ago
  Yep - I have to say we totally agree with this and am just trying to work out how we can make such a change so it's informative, but not overwhelming for repeat users. Getting to the data fast is important, but understanding why we're a vast improvement over the alternatives is clearly just as important! This is something we need to get right, and we will think about how we can portray it more clearly.
jordn 14y ago
This is great to see. Not only because I know how much of a painful, dated system most lettings have to go through but also because you're a small british startup taking on a few, dull big players and seemingly getting somewhere. When I looked a this problem before, it appeared to me that Rightmove etc. wouldn't let normal landlords list their own properties because of The Property Misdescriptions Act put too high a risk on the listing if there were some false claims and basically an estate agent was essentially required as a guarantor that it's legit. How do you get around that?
jpdoctor 14y ago
As for the US: The entire realtor system needs to die a quick death. It is anti-competitive and is engineered to take advantage of noobs, both to housing and markets in general. If there is any doubt, this publication was published by the chief economist of the National Association for Realtors at the height of the housing bubble: http://www.amazon.com/Real-Estate-Boom-Will-Bust/dp/0385514352 http://www.amazon.com/Real-Estate-Boom-Will-Bust/dp/03855143... Edit: There is an important "not" missing from the html anchor.
joefarish 14y ago
Do you have any plans to provide historic pricing data? At the moment It seems like only the letting agents really know what the 'market rates' are and naturally this puts them at an advantage.
- dazbradbury 14y ago
  Sure - we'd see no reason to hide that. In fact, it's the kind of data that landlords will find very useful when pricing their property, so it's clearly in our interests to provide it. Having said that, at our current scale, it's not going to be interesting enough. Once we hit the right numbers, and I'm not sure what that is yet, we will look to release these figures and create a tool for landlords.
chris_wot 14y ago
Wow! This has really come along since last time! I'm very, very impressed with what you have done here!
arb99 14y ago
Looks good. Are (some of) the current listings on there fetched from other sites?
- dazbradbury 14y ago
  Nope - they are all listed by OpenRent landlords. We don't scrape other sites.
xoail 14y ago
I really like this idea. I once had a similar idea for the US market and did quite a bit of research. I spoke to bunch realestate agents about it and almost all give me thumbs down. They were probably afraid technology could ruined their career but some of the points they shared where eye opening. It only made me realize that unless one of those biggest realestate firms back you in this pursuit, it will be hard as hell to get all these realestate agents out of jobs.
tocomment 14y ago
How are you doing marketing for this? How do you get over the chicken and egg problem? E.g., buyers won't come unless sellers are listing, and sellers won't list unless there are buyers.
- dazbradbury 14y ago
  Take a look at our landlords about page: http://www.openrent.co.uk/landlords http://www.openrent.co.uk/landlords We offer a full service (beyond a simple marketplace) to attract our customers (landlords), and overcome the chicken and egg problem by advertising on already popular portals.
  - tocomment 14y ago
    The services for landlords are really amazing. Have you considered expanding to the US?
    - tocomment 14y ago
      I was thinking of doing something like this but for niche retail rentals in the US. Could I bounce some questions off of you?
      - dazbradbury 14y ago
        Sure, you can get me on [redacted]. Note - I may not get back to you tonight, but will endeavour to do so in the next 24 hours.
    - dazbradbury 14y ago
      If pg was willing to consider us for YC, we probably would! However, when we applied with the idea last year, we were told the chicken and egg problem was too off-putting. We would also need to spend some time looking at the US market seriously to see how we would go about it, for now, the UK is 100% our focus.
citricsquid 14y ago
I like the site but the map at the top of the search, can that be collapsible? It feels very suffocating; I don't care about the map but I have to have it take up ~50% of the screen with the results (what I do care about) listed below! Also when updating the filters it's so fast (yay!) that the "loading" screen flashes up for only a few ms so it appears like the screen is flashing black. And my final thing: if you view a listing via the search it should give the option to "go back to search" without needing to use back. Other than that it's great!
kgogolek 14y ago
Are you guys considering foing something similar for selling properties? It's a standard in a lot of EU countries to sell the houses without the agents etc. I've always been really surprised this model does not apply in UK.

58 points by dazbradbury 14y ago

Great site and as mentioned before, an industry ripe for the picking. One thing that would be great is if zooming out on the map increased the search distance on the results - searched for Leytonstone (no results) and scanned around/zoomed out looking for other properties.

kgogolek 14y ago

really nice site. UK needs something tool like this, especially in this market. The agent fees are ridic. Good luck with your project!

dazbradbury 14y ago
Co-Founder here. Thanks for your comments. We've already helped tenants and landlords save tens of thousands of pounds, now we're just looking to scale up and help even more!
- sdoering 14y ago
  Something like this would have helped me tremendously, when I came to Hamburg, Germany nearly 4 years ago. I really love the idea and hope, that this will spread. how do you keep agents out? what if the register as owners? agent-fees are a pain - not only in the UK. So hope someday you will make the internationalization-jump.
  - dazbradbury 14y ago
    We have a few systems in place to stop agents, and have had to make the decision to delist many properties based on this. I don't want to elaborate too much and help agents circumvent our systems, but essentially there isn't too much motivation for agents to list. We advertise as having no agent fees, and as such, it breaks the agents model of charging fees. This disincentivises most agents. Furthermore, tenants don't want to pay fees when they find out they don't have to...
    - Datonomics 14y ago
      Just curious, how do agent fees normally work in London?
      - dazbradbury 14y ago
        For a "tenant find" service, agents normally charge landlords between 5% and 15% of the annual rent. They will then add on charges for deposit handling, contract drafting, referencing, etc... All fixed charges at the £30-£150 mark each. To tenants, agents will charge similar fees, normally in the region of hundreds of pounds. This will cover referencing and general "admin". It is these fees we are combating against - and will hopefully be able to eradicate. Agents will also offer a "fully managed service" for between 5% and 15% of the rent per month, but that is not something we're tackling at the moment...
        sdoering 14y ago
        Thanks for your elaborate answers. here in Germany the fees are sometimes in the range of 1 - 2 monthly rates. The last one is the maximum allowed value by law. But, as you have to pay a damage deposit to your new landlord as well, this might add up in cost around 5 monthly rents. OK, if everything goes well, the damage deposit returns to your valet, once you move again, but that is a lot of money to have at hand upfront. So a service like this will help a lot of people - as said before.
        Datonomics 14y ago
        It's amazing that a system like that has lasted. Good luck to you!
- com 14y ago
  Someone should enter the market with a product like this in the Randstad in the Netherlands, focussing on Amsterdam and The Hague. The number of new foreigners who aren't able to access the subsidized rental market every year is in the tens of thousands, and the letting agents here charge ridiculous amounts for no apparent service to owners or tenants.

alexchamberlain 14y ago

I'm looking for a flat in London at the moment; I want a 1 bedroom flat, but not a studio flat. You can't search for that using your UI.

dazbradbury 14y ago
Noted - we added studio / flat share options very recently, and just need to update the search page. Will add that to our short-term TODO list!
- NickPollard 14y ago
  Just to add a second to this, when I was last flat hunting some 5 months ago this was a huge problem for me online - searching for '1-bed' would show me studios and flatshares when all I was interested in was a proper 1-bed flat. Glad to hear you're working on it, I've bookmarked you for the next time I move.
- mietek 14y ago
  Please make sure searching for 1-bed apartments does not show studios and flatshares. This is absolutely infuriating on many other sites.
  - alexchamberlain 14y ago
    I have to agree; it has to be the most frustrating part of looking for a flat. Another thing I hate is no plan. Pictures are great, but without a plan it's really hard to imagine how big (small) rooms are.
  - wattson12 14y ago
    This is a great point. I'm looking for a 1 bed place in London at the moment. I don't mind a studio, but showing flat shares when I have put a maximum of 1 bedroom in the filter is very annoying (looking at you, rightmove)

dailygrind 14y ago

Excellent domain and the website also looks nice. Can you give us some background about the technology used?

dazbradbury 14y ago
Thanks! Sure - we're a .Net (MVC) back-end, running on Appharbor (those guys have been awesome). Hopefully we can handle the HN-Effect we're currently experiencing...
- nopassrecover 14y ago
  Interested to see how Appharbor goes. I've been using a .NET MVC-based setup to achieve a similar thing here in Aus (for friends only currently as I've been relying on scraping for data). Really impressed with your customer dev efforts by the way.

r4vik 14y ago

Good stuff @dazbradbury, you've got 100x more inventory than the last time I looked, how did you pull it off? Big partnership or have you started scraping (doesn't look like it)?

dazbradbury 14y ago
Nope - have just been getting out there and speaking to landlords. Marketing has been our main focus, and will continue to be as we grow. No scraping as we want to ensure our properties are all live and we have a relationship (albeit a digital one) with our landlords. It also means we can add a lot of value.
- chris_wot 14y ago
  Fellas, when are you releasing in Australia?!?

rheide 14y ago

I love it! Estate agents in London are a royal pain. If this gets rid of them I will be extremely grateful. You are improving the world, sir. Suggestion: some (most) apartments require users to give references. How about allowing users to verify themselves on the site so they don't have to provide references for properties they want to rent. Could include some warranty service for people posting apartments that make use of this arrangement. (tl;dr: make it more like airbnb).

dazbradbury 14y ago
Thanks! Our aim is most certainly to save tenants and landlords vast sums of money, as well as improve the rental market itself. We've already helped tenants and landlords save tens of thousands of pounds, but we're definitely not stopping there. If the result is letting agents being eradicated, then I don't think many people will be too upset! Regarding references - this is something we would definitely work towards. Ideally we could verify enough information digitally that landlords don't ask for the further references, but right now we don't have the capital to offer the warranty. For now, we just make references much cheaper (£20), rather than paying an agency hundreds of pounds.

volpav 14y ago

I like it. My 2 cents regarding the UI: 1. Labels under the filter area look like buttons, I always want to click one of them :-) 2. The "sticky" top with map and filters and the scrolling list at the bottom I think not the best UX decision. I have a relatively small screen (1028x1024) and I almost don't see the list. Maybe the solution would be to be able to collapse the filters and map (and bring the map by clicking on the map icon from the listing).

volpav 14y ago
One more thing: it seems like the filters area sometimes overlays the footer (on my screen) so I'm not able to click any of the links at the bottom before the cursor reaches the (imaginary) border between filters and list.

vladoh 14y ago

I really like the interface - very clear and simple. I wish I had something like this for Munich, where the search for apartments is really a nightmare. What are your plans for expanding your service?

VBprogrammer 14y ago

This appears to be a UK based site so why on earth are the distance units in Kilometres?

dazbradbury 14y ago
I get this a lot - I guess it was one of my americanisms coming through when writing the front end (I lived in the states for a few years), as well as a preference for working in KM. Essentially, it's on the TODO list to be updated.
- wtvanhest 14y ago
  We don't use KMs in the US either.
justincormack 14y ago
Because we are metric in the Uk. What's more odd is distances from London for things in London. Presumably from some bogus centre.
- kirchhoff 14y ago
  Not in all cases. Distances of such length are almost always measured in miles here.
  - buro9 14y ago
    Only because of road signage and a failure to complete the move to metric. I tend to use both miles and KM. Miles in the car, KM on the bicycle. I understand and can visualise what a KM is better than what a mile is though.
- VBprogrammer 14y ago
  Distances and speeds on our road system are always measured in miles. As such most British people generally have a much stronger intuition of Miles than they do Kilometres (except strangely runners who quite often use Kilometres).

Silhouette 14y ago

Sounds like a great idea to me. The rental market here in Cambridge is always fairly vibrant for the size of the city, but the agencies don't seem to make many friends with either landlords or tenants. I expect you could make a very tidy profit (and a lot of friends :-)) disrupting their market! It's probably quite seasonal in a place like this, but on the flip side, if you could land a good deal with the universities to help place all their living-out students, that might be worth a quid or two.

anovikov 14y ago

Why is almost all housing in London so shitty? It was my big shock when i first came there. Almost all except the very top of the market (over 2000GBP per week, and there are few flats that expensive) appear so terrible... Is that only London or all of the country is like that? Why? Something like tax laws making it prohibitive to renovate housing? Why there is still a lot of 100+ years old rotten houses in London, definitely bearing no historical significance, their planning clearly showing they were build before electricity? I was very surprised since i came from a country many times poorer than the U.K. and yet the housing stock looks so much better there.

barking 14y ago
I prefer older houses, they're usually better soundproofed for starters and have higher ceilings and sash windows which provide better ventilation. The high cost in London is simply because of the demand.
- anovikov 14y ago
  I am not complaining about the costs, that is okay. But overwhelming majority of housing is in really terrible condition, the one that covers almost all of the market except the very top. Other places i used to live in, those with 20-50% of U.K.'s per capita GDP, have much better housing, new and old one.
  - barking 14y ago
    Well if you can afford housing in London then maybe you were at the very top of the market in other countries? I left London partly so I could afford to live in a nicer house. I'd imagine it's a similar story in places like Hong Kong, Singapore, New York.
  - NickPollard 14y ago
    As someone living in London, I would generally agree with this - compared to a lot of places, London does seem to have a lot of housing in quite bad repair. To take a wild guess why, I would suggest two factors: 1) The housing stock is old compared to a lot of places, so much of it needs modernization and renovation 2) The lack of space to expand (plus restrictions on greenfield developments) means new housing is limited, so there is not much competition to existing landlords. Why spend thousands of £ on upgrading your property if you can leave it as it is and still charge high rents?

lhnz 14y ago

Great, but I'm looking for a flat share. Do you do those?

sdfjkl 14y ago
I see lots of flat shares listed, but there doesn't seem to be a filter for them, which would be useful.

cheza 14y ago

Great site! FYI, you have a small typo on the FAQ page: "OpenRent are here to ease the administrative burdon and reduce costs." Should be "burden"

dazbradbury 14y ago
Good spot, and thanks for telling us! Have updated it for inclusion in our next release (once we've ridden the HN wave.)

retube 14y ago

Here's why a landlord will pay a reputable estate agent a 10% fee. They will: - market the property on places like rightmove, findaproperty etc - show prospective tenants around (so you don't have to take time off work) - take pictures, measurements and construct floor plans - do credit, CRB and reference checks - provide a boilerplate tenancy agreement (which you can amend as you like) - sort out posting of deposits to the Tenancy Deposit Scheme - collect the rent The amount of time and hassle all this saves is a lot... Of course there are crummy agents so do your research. Incidently - your "no risk" claim is a worrying one and suggests you don't know much about the lettings business.

dazbradbury 14y ago
Here's what OpenRent offers (take a look here: http://www.openrent.co.uk/landlords http://www.openrent.co.uk/landlords): - We'll market the property on places like rightmove, findaproperty etc - We'll do credit, CRB and reference checks - We'll provide a boilerplate tenancy agreement (which you can amend as you like), AND we'll provide a digital agreement for online signatures. - We'll sort out posting of deposits to the Tenancy Deposit Scheme - We'll tell tenants where and when to pay the rent. ie. A standing order into the landlord's bank account, but we don't collect it as such. What we don't do: - The viewings. Obviously this is a huge cost saving that we can pass onto the tenants and landlords, but also, tenants like meeting the landlord, and landlords like meeting their prospective tenants. Who better to show you round?
- mijail 14y ago
  Super good looking site! From my understanding you are an agent that does everything except the showing. I think your last point is kind of key and may need to be fleshed out more. I agree that tenants like meeting the landlord, however, landlord may like meeting tenants but they usually are unable to. Landlords are in the business of owning property. They use a service provider like brokers to make their life more convenient, so they can focus on the core of their business. The first few points are administrative tasks the real burden is to schedule appointments and show up for appointments that are usually a waste of time (that's why brokers are bitter!)Perhaps facilitating the different aspect of these appointments for landlords can help disrupt the status quo.

stef25 14y ago

Looks very nice, I love these type of real estate projects. I've heard before that agencies in the UK are a royal pain, but surely this isn't the first website that tried to bypass them. What sets this one apart?

stef25 14y ago

On your site it says "our service now includes: Listing on our site as well as Rightmove, Zoopla, FindaProperty, Globrix, PrimeLocation and more to advertise your property to millions of high quality tenants". Does this mean that a posting on your site also appears on those portals? If so, how do you do this technically?

dazbradbury 14y ago
That is correct - the major portals have various data feeds for accepting property listings from agents. We can use those to list as we are ourselves registered agents - just much more affordable ones!

twelvechairs 14y ago

To provide a bit of constructive criticism, I don't think your front page (the real front page, not the link here) describes quickly and clearly what exactly you do. I sort of assumed it was just direct contact between landlord and tenant (like moveflat, gumtree, craigslist, etc.) and went straight into searching. The only indication of the other side of what you do (a streamlined version of some, but not all of a traditional lettings agent's services) is in the 'for landlords' box (for the very few who read that far down), or in the 'learn more' pages. I want to know the whole process of what I'm in for (as a prospective tenant or landlord) - i think you definitely need to flag this side of things to your users right at the top of the front page. Also - the word 'open' might have thrown me, as I guess I was expecting from the name something a bit more free and user-curated rather than a service-driven company. [edit] that said - I think what you are doing is great and I'd love to see this kind of streamlined and professional service without a huge cost take over alot of the business of traditional agents.

dazbradbury 14y ago
Yep - I have to say we totally agree with this and am just trying to work out how we can make such a change so it's informative, but not overwhelming for repeat users. Getting to the data fast is important, but understanding why we're a vast improvement over the alternatives is clearly just as important! This is something we need to get right, and we will think about how we can portray it more clearly.

jordn 14y ago

This is great to see. Not only because I know how much of a painful, dated system most lettings have to go through but also because you're a small british startup taking on a few, dull big players and seemingly getting somewhere. When I looked a this problem before, it appeared to me that Rightmove etc. wouldn't let normal landlords list their own properties because of The Property Misdescriptions Act put too high a risk on the listing if there were some false claims and basically an estate agent was essentially required as a guarantor that it's legit. How do you get around that?

jpdoctor 14y ago

As for the US: The entire realtor system needs to die a quick death. It is anti-competitive and is engineered to take advantage of noobs, both to housing and markets in general. If there is any doubt, this publication was published by the chief economist of the National Association for Realtors at the height of the housing bubble: http://www.amazon.com/Real-Estate-Boom-Will-Bust/dp/0385514352 http://www.amazon.com/Real-Estate-Boom-Will-Bust/dp/03855143... Edit: There is an important "not" missing from the html anchor.

joefarish 14y ago

Do you have any plans to provide historic pricing data? At the moment It seems like only the letting agents really know what the 'market rates' are and naturally this puts them at an advantage.

dazbradbury 14y ago
Sure - we'd see no reason to hide that. In fact, it's the kind of data that landlords will find very useful when pricing their property, so it's clearly in our interests to provide it. Having said that, at our current scale, it's not going to be interesting enough. Once we hit the right numbers, and I'm not sure what that is yet, we will look to release these figures and create a tool for landlords.

chris_wot 14y ago

Wow! This has really come along since last time! I'm very, very impressed with what you have done here!

arb99 14y ago

Looks good. Are (some of) the current listings on there fetched from other sites?

dazbradbury 14y ago
Nope - they are all listed by OpenRent landlords. We don't scrape other sites.

xoail 14y ago

I really like this idea. I once had a similar idea for the US market and did quite a bit of research. I spoke to bunch realestate agents about it and almost all give me thumbs down. They were probably afraid technology could ruined their career but some of the points they shared where eye opening. It only made me realize that unless one of those biggest realestate firms back you in this pursuit, it will be hard as hell to get all these realestate agents out of jobs.

tocomment 14y ago

How are you doing marketing for this? How do you get over the chicken and egg problem? E.g., buyers won't come unless sellers are listing, and sellers won't list unless there are buyers.

dazbradbury 14y ago
Take a look at our landlords about page: http://www.openrent.co.uk/landlords http://www.openrent.co.uk/landlords We offer a full service (beyond a simple marketplace) to attract our customers (landlords), and overcome the chicken and egg problem by advertising on already popular portals.
- tocomment 14y ago
  The services for landlords are really amazing. Have you considered expanding to the US?
  - tocomment 14y ago
    I was thinking of doing something like this but for niche retail rentals in the US. Could I bounce some questions off of you?
    - dazbradbury 14y ago
      Sure, you can get me on [redacted]. Note - I may not get back to you tonight, but will endeavour to do so in the next 24 hours.
  - dazbradbury 14y ago
    If pg was willing to consider us for YC, we probably would! However, when we applied with the idea last year, we were told the chicken and egg problem was too off-putting. We would also need to spend some time looking at the US market seriously to see how we would go about it, for now, the UK is 100% our focus.

citricsquid 14y ago

I like the site but the map at the top of the search, can that be collapsible? It feels very suffocating; I don't care about the map but I have to have it take up ~50% of the screen with the results (what I do care about) listed below! Also when updating the filters it's so fast (yay!) that the "loading" screen flashes up for only a few ms so it appears like the screen is flashing black. And my final thing: if you view a listing via the search it should give the option to "go back to search" without needing to use back. Other than that it's great!

kgogolek 14y ago

Are you guys considering foing something similar for selling properties? It's a standard in a lot of EU countries to sell the houses without the agents etc. I've always been really surprised this model does not apply in UK.