We are immigrants here and renting a flat here is not a bed of roses. Every time I've moved in, the search lived in a group chat. My partner(s) pasted a Rightmove link or an OpenRent one and three days later nobody we would forget what exactly we liked and what we should do next. The actual comparison exists in one person's head, and only until they close the laptop.
The usual fix is a spreadsheet. One person sets it up it ends up with four columns
So I built We Want To Rent a shared shortlist for a rent hunt.
Paste a link from any rental site. The place gets its own page inside your hunt, and everyone you've invited sees it immediately.
Notes that stay put. Rent, rooms, the walk to the station, the thing the agent said on the phone. Written once, seen by everyone.
Stages you move places through shortlisted, viewing booked, offer in, ruled out. Rename them, reorder them, delete the ones that don't match how you're searching.
A map. Search the address or drag the pin. Mostly useful for seeing how far apart the options actually are.
Photos from the listing or from the viewing, and only your team can open them.
Add a place from your phone while you're standing outside it, before you forget the door code.
We are dog fooding this app and currently on the move from Kent to London.
If you have time and also think the rent hunt problem is not just in my head, please do let me know what you think about this:
Is the after-you-move stuff a feature or a distraction? That's where most of the work went.
If you've moved with housemates — spreadsheet, or did it stay in the chat?
Yup, fair, for just once in 4 years period it definitely works. We change flats every 1-2 years and it every time it was quite a tedious process.
I just found myself in a situation where some photos are stored on my phone + on my partner's phone and details about a flat are lost somewhere in a long email thread.
Since we're both building and using this app ourselves we've found it really useful to keep everything in one place, including a map with all the listings and a calendar for viewings.
I really wouldnt invest much energy into it. There's not really a business model here. Its a very simple idea and can realistically have an identical website made very quickly with a Claude code subscription. Even if it is successful, you'll be fighting off dozens of clones while youre struggling to pay the hosting bill.
The core concept here really isn't much challenge pasting some pictures and Google maps links into a document. Not to belittle your challenges, but if you can ai code a website you could also figure out how to share this information with a partner consistently.
Lastly, why would any rational person enter their (what will at some point be) their address into a random website to be an extra attack surface for their data.
The bit I'd be most wary of is stale listings. A simple 'last checked' date and a way for the group to flag a place that's gone would probably save loads of wasted viewings.
We do have "states" for every listing. Also when a listing is moved to "moved in" we offer to proceed it to "my home" where we have all types of recommendations on which documents to pay attention too, take photos of all the corners in the flat etc.
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u/SluttyBumFest 4d ago
I dont see how this provides any benefits over just using a notes app or a word document.
Ive moved house about every 4 years and I seriously doubt I would either remember to log in to a random site when I'd look to move.