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)
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).
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.
#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!
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?
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 ;)
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.
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).
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.
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...).
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!
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.
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.
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.
yeah this kind of problem does happen in many property sources. At the moment the users can report "Expired ad" so those properties won't appear again. We are brainstorming hard to tackle this tricky problem.
Couple of ideas you're welcome to (I played with exactly the same idea you have a few years ago but couldn't be bothered in the end):
The distinction between private and commercial ads isn't always clear, particularly on Gumtree where a lot of the time when you call a supposed private ad, it's actually an agent. You could add a "blacklist" of mobile telephone numbers which are known to be agents so if you view a private ad link there should be a link to "report this as a commercial property agent" and then after a threshold, mark any scraped ads with that number as commercial. Some people prefer going directly as the agency fees and service is utter crap and eats into your property budget pretty quick.
Add your own private adverts as well so you're the best augmented source of properties there are. Be the agent :-)
Also, don't just target the word "flat" - it can be a seen as a negative for non-flats so you're excluding some of your potential already. There is a lucrative market in high end housing which you could charge click-throughs on later to support yourself!
"You must not copy, transmit, modify, republish, store (in whole or in part), frame, pass-off or link to any material or information on or downloaded from this Site without our prior written consent."
Have you taken a licence from Rightmove et al for the data usage?
Heh, nope, but it's an insubstantial part of the whole and thus wouldn't constitute infringement.
Plus my pasting of a company's terms to ask whether the OP is in compliance is hardly likely to attract the ire of the company, whereas if I was Rightmove's lawyers I might have an issue with someone taking parts of my database wholesale for usage on a competing site.
I personally think a competitor aggregating results is a positive thing, but I was just curious as to whether this was done with a licence or not.
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.
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.
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)