Hello Homies

The first blog post of a company is always the hardest to write. It’s the first line you draw on a blank piece of paper, it is the first time you tell the world in your own words what the company is about.

But it can also be the easiest to write – you can just plainly and simply tell the story of how the company came about, so that’s exactly what we’d do here.

Beginning

Homie.co started the way most innovation starts – we observed a problem in our own lives, then went about attempting to fix it. In this case, one of our co-founders, Saurabh, had housemates leaving Singapore and had to move out of his apartment and find a room to rent.

Finding a room to rent can be quite daunting. Firstly, it’s really stressful since you are on a clock – you have x days to find a place or you will be on the streets (or on someone’s couch if, hopefully, you have some close friends locally).

Secondly, it’s incredibly time-consuming because it is actually quite complex – the variables are many: the people living there, location, rent, move-in date, transport, amenities, layout and design, decor, furniture, rental period and terms, facilities, house rules, etc.

And thirdly, it’s often a learning process in itself, people often had to learn what the market is like by checking out apartments at a particular location or budget to learn that they have to either increase their budget, live further away, or live in a less ideal place – and that process right now is based on opening and comparing listings pretty much randomly.

Problems

Combining the experience of Saurabh and our teammates such as Conor (who has recently arrived in Singapore) and yours truly (I have been renting in Singapore for the last 20 years), we came up with a list of the problems we faced while looking for an apartment or a room to rent:

1. Data

– No accurate info about the place – vague addresses, number of bedrooms/people living there, inaccurate or incomplete rental terms, etc.

– No photos of the place – specifically, often no photos of the interior of the apartment and the room

– Some criteria are not mentioned upfront, such as only female roommates were welcome (it might take some effort for some of us to fulfill this criteria)

– Some “features” of the place are not mentioned as well, such as there are 4 cats living at the place 

2. Design

– When we were looking for an apartment – we had to open many listings on multiple sites, shortlisting it (sometimes duplicating), contacting to clarify a certain question, request for pictures, sync up on viewing schedule, etc.

– We realized that we had to context-switch between rental sites, google map, calendar, and email/phone many times while doing this and it was a colossal pain

– Specifically, it was very difficult to quickly combine the various information into one place to decide quickly whether to throw away, keep-in-view, shortlist, contact-to-clarify or to schedule a viewing ASAP 

3. Trust

– There’s little sense of which of these listings can be trusted – whether they are real or valid to begin with

– Most sites have very little about the person posting the listing, and whether that would be a person you would trust

– Agents make the problem worse by lurking on these sites, and they don’t often identify themselves upfront and it is also not clear what the fees structure is if any

While we love cats, we do believe it would be useful to know that a household has cats before spending thursday night traveling for an hour to and back to view an apartment, especially if you are allergic to cats.

Lofty

Beyond just searching for a roof above your head, we also deeply believe that roommates can be the inspiration and path to an awesome experience, or make your life a living hell if you encounter a bad one.

Roommates are not just the gateway to insights and social circles to a new city or neighborhood, it’s how you might learn a new language or a skill, or in many cases roommates would go on to become life long best friends, business associates and maybe start great things together.

We also noticed that most of these rental sites were both stuck in the last century (with no Facebook integration, for example, to tell you about the person or if you have common friends) and were in general utilitarian and soulless – that inspired us to try to inject a dose of humanity and connection to the roommate search process.

Personally, some of my best friends are my roommates from 20 years ago, I started my last company with my roommates in college and next week i am going to the wedding of my roommates from a few years back.We wanted to go beyond finding a room to rent and really see how we can help connect people who would have a great time living together, and maybe even do a little more to connect people who would want to find each other in a city.

Homie.co

Homie was thus born to create a different approach to room and apartment rental search – we are just at the beginning of the work we intend to do. Some of these problems are quite hard to solve, and many would take time.

We look forward too your support, your feedback and your criticism, and most of all, we look forward to delivering a valuable product to help you find the ideal home in a delightful experience.

Drop us a line anytime!

✌ Peace ✌

~ Darius
Team Homie

Ready to find the home you’ll love? Go to 99.co!