Show HN: Awesome rent search website in the UK

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)

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.

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...).

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.