Show HN: Properties to rent - No agent fees, no dead listings, no risk | Hacker News Reader

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

openrent.co.uk

58 pointsdazbradbury78 comments

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).

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.

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.

Here's what OpenRent offers (take a look here: 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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Yes probably something about that - restrictions on new development and a lot of other red tape which all but prohibits complete renovations of entire houses and/or new construction. Because otherwise, in a country with that much fluid capital, you would have a lot of good housing (and land isn't a problem, as most of those houses are just 3-5 storeys, and public transportation is in perfect shape meaning you could squeeze in a lot more people).

Even the very center, places like Knightsbridge, are almost entirely old, rotten shit.

We like those old houses. We do not consider them shit. The entire character of the city comes from its history embodied in its buildings. Most of the new homes are total shit, and won't last nearly as long as the old stuff.

Indeed, but the OP is foreign and I have noticed that people from many countries hate old houses, eg Polish friends of mine think we are weird living in old places. Rather glad we haven't knocked London down and turned it into Barratt homes myself.

I think it's just basic economics. There are some areas in the UK where there is such a concentration of interest that demand far outstrips supply, and London is the biggest example. That leads to dramatically higher prices in those areas, and presumably makes the market less competitive in terms of quality as well.

Good question. This is my experience as well.

Not all housing in London is like that. Like any city it's hard to find the best areas and nicest deals as a newcomer. A lot of the nice/cheap flats are snapped up very quickly by people in privileged positions (i.e. nice flats may be passed around within friendship groups or within a workplace). There are loads of lovely, old, well renovated flats, you just need to be lucky or well informed to find one. We pay GBP1300 per month for a newly renovated, spacious 1 bedroom flat in a Victorian terrace. Give me a period property over a flimsy/shabby new build any day of the week.

This is basically the story of every major city I've lived in, except Miami. NYC: crappy, cramped apartments. SF: I believe the crappy ones collapsed after the earthquakes and fires, what's left is typical San Francisco. London: I assume they can't build anything taller than 3 stories outside of London City. Everyone is always complaining how there is no place to live and yet everywhere I went were these squat brownstones. Most had no redeeming architectural qualities so why they weren't razed to the ground still baffles me. Paris: doesn't have the housing pressure of London. I might be biased because I've had the best luck in getting really good apartments in Paris. Either because I'm really lucky or I just figured how and "who" to ask when I needed an apartment. The buildings are 2x the height of London and the city feels much smaller geographically yet feels like the same number of people.

From what I understand, Paris has an appearance ordinance on apartments so property owners have a duty to keep up appearance. Not doing that leads to fines and fines eventually lead to them auctioning off your building. That last part can take decades.

Same impressions of Paris. Great, liveable city.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

Please make sure searching for 1-bed apartments does not show studios and flatshares. This is absolutely infuriating on many other sites.

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.

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)

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!

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?

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?

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!

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

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...

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.

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

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?

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?

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.

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.

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.

Take a look at our landlords about page:

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.

The services for landlords are really amazing. Have you considered expanding to the US?

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.

I was thinking of doing something like this but for niche retail rentals in the US. Could I bounce some questions off of you?

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.

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.

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.

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)?

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.

Fellas, when are you releasing in Australia?!?

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).

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.

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.

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.

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/03855143...

Edit: There is an important "not" missing from the html anchor.

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

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!

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.

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...

Just curious, how do agent fees normally work in London?

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...

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.

It's amazing that a system like that has lasted. Good luck to you!

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.

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"

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

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

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.

We don't use KMs in the US either.

Because we are metric in the Uk.

What's more odd is distances from London for things in London. Presumably from some bogus centre.

Not in all cases. Distances of such length are almost always measured in miles here.

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.

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).

Maybe it depends if you have a car. Runners, cyclists, people who go by train, people who travel to Europe, technical people all use km. I wouldn't have ever thought of using miles on a website...

(Unfortunately) that's not true. All road distances are Miles here in the UK. By this I mean road signs, maps, vehicle speedometers and trips, etc.

I wish we did use Km - I just spent a couple of months riding my motorcycle around Europe, and metric everything just felt so much more intuitive.

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

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

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

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

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