

Show HN: Awesome rent search website in the UK - thlt
http://cravify.com/rent

======
MehdiEG
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/> \- 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
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
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
I think you nailed it. Definitely the way to go.

------
henri
@MehdiEG

1 - There are two main reasons why listings are kept online even if they are
already taken. Firstly, agencies purposely keep listings on so that they can
occupy a slightly larger search percentage on property sites. I believe by law
they can continue advertising a property for a further two weeks after being
taken.

The second reason is that when you look at the supply chain of how listings
get onto a property site - you can see why listings are often already taken,
especially in highly populated areas such as London. An agent has their own
website to manage - you can bet they update it with new listings daily but do
they remove old listings at the same time? Those listings are then pushed to
property portals via the software provider in a feed. Usually it will take at
least 24 hours until those listings go live on the property portal, which in
many cases may already be too late.

2 - In the UK, if you rent through an agency you should expect to pay extra on
top. Usually the agency fee covers things like credit/reference checks and
prevents time wasters. Imagine if there were no fees and I called up three
agencies and told them I wanted to take each property. Then all three removed
the listings from their site/property portal - I'm only going to take one
property, so two agencies would have their time wasted, maybe all three if I
decided I didn't want any of them.

Whilst it is annoying for us to call up for a listing that is advertised as
available only to find it has already been taken, I think if we look from both
sides it becomes more apparent why it happens. In terms of the "extra" costs,
it all boils down to data quality. Even if the option was available for agents
to indicate their "extra" costs, I can guarantee most would not use it. If
they were forced to use it, most would provide inaccurate data.

My advice to you, is find a property website that you like searching on. The
quality of data (as in the listings) all boils down to the source, the
agencies, and nothing can be done about it. The only thing property sites can
do is to ensure they keep their site as up to date as possible from the feeds
(sometimes low quality) they receive.

~~~
semanticist
Agency fees are outright illegal in Scotland, although many agencies charge
them anyway, hoping people won't challenge them.

There's currently a campaign to raise awareness on this.

<http://www.reclaimyourfees.com/>

------
aimacs
I made something that looks a bit similar a year ago using Gumtree data:
<http://www.live-there.co.uk/>

All the data is now outdated however since there didn't seem to be anything to
gain from putting any more work to it (and I would prefer to avoid web
development stuff...).

~~~
thlt
it's more of the backend work than frontend thou :).

------
patrick_t
This is really useful, and seems to give better results than PadMapper.

One thing though: I get an error "Ad detail not available at this zoom level"
when I zoom out too much, which is somewhat annoying.

Edit: it would also be nice if it saved your search preferences between
sessions.

~~~
thlt
yeah because the site is under heavy traffic at the moment, we shall upgrade
the server with more CPU to handle this, but not right now.

Saved search reference is now in the plan :). Thanks.

------
cjrp
Really cool site - my only (minor) criticism would be that the sliders for
number of bedrooms let you select (approximately) 1.3 bedrooms, etc. Would be
nice if they 'snapped' to 1/2/3... Other than that, very useful!

~~~
thlt
ah ha, 1.3 is actually 1 :D, some people prefer a smooth transition (like me
:D), so this will be taken into consideration.

~~~
cjrp
Fair enough, I think it's personal preference like you said. Perhaps being
able to choose a range would be good too.. recently I was looking for a 1 or 2
bed.

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axefrog
Really cool! Can I suggest allowing £/month as an option? Most places in
Manchester rent by the month, so seeing prices displayed as a weekly value
makes the rent a bit harder to quickly get a sense of.

~~~
thlt
sure, this is in the plan.

------
kaolinite
Wish I'd had this a few months back, found a number of suitable-looking
properties on there that weren't shown on sites like Rightmove.

~~~
thlt
yeah because we aggregate data from many different sources like Rightmove,
gumtree, oodle, foxton, zoopla, etc, it reasonably has more properties.

~~~
gouranga
Please don't aggregate Foxtons. They are utter asshats and half their
properties don't exist.

~~~
adam-_-
From my experience this is true of ALL rental agents.

~~~
gouranga
Perhaps someone needs to get rid of them...

~~~
thlt
Our approach is collaboration filtering amongst house hunters + machine
learning. Keep an eye on this ;).

------
cfontes
I am doing this too in Brazil... we are going to launch soon, but or idea is a
bit different.

~~~
thlt
Hope you all the best :)

------
tdubhro1
great to see anything that helps finding property in London easier. Any reason
you're only showing flats and not including houses as well? I'd imagine once
you go outside zone 2 houses will be in the majority.

~~~
thlt
Hi, Flat for rent/Flat for share is indeed just the category name, info of
houses are included in the database too. I reckon this is too misleading, and
should be changed soon.

------
hongduc
Good Website

------
thlt
DEAR ALL, Please vote up so that more people know about Cravify. Thanks a
bunch.

