Happy Birthday America, here’s an app
What do you get the hegemon who has everything?
Tomorrow marks 241 years since America settled one of the greatest tenant/landlord disputes in history (or, at least, handed in its written notice). With the frequent rent-hikes & a habit of popping-in unannounced, most of colonial America’s grievances with Britain sound all-too familiar to the modern apartment renter.
While it may be too late for us to help America weather its bad landlord situation (well, the 1776 version, anyway), the modern renter could still use a hand. That’s why today we’re announcing some big changes to Wayhome — like, declaration-big.
We’re an app now
By our last count, there were 84 separate apartment listing websites in the U.S. Since one of our goals in building Wayhome was to help users navigate this jungle (both ‘Apartment Navigator’ & ‘Rent Jungle’ are actual apartment sites, as it happens), we started with a website/Chrome extension product — sort of like Pinterest.
We learned pretty quickly from our users that this just didn’t work. Integrating our web app & Chrome extension into a cohesive UX was a challenge, and the results weren’t nearly as seamless as we wanted them to be.
To remedy this, Wayhome’s top apartment-finding scientists locked themselves into our Innovation Basement along with some of the latest & greatest tech & enough Soylent for 3 weeks.
We weren’t disappointed. Take a look:
The new app brings improvements to the apartment search in three big areas:
Convenience
The new version of Wayhome takes a huge step towards putting the most basic tasks of an apartment search under one e-roof: searching for listings on different sites, saving your favorites and even communicating with roommates/partners/parents/tech-savvy pets/etc.
Finding an apartment is, for lots of people, among the biggest financial decisions they’ll ever make. While spreadsheets and Gmail are great, we thought such an important task ought to have its very own tool.
Maps
Location matters, and nothing helps you compare apartments’ locations better than maps. Google Maps helps, and lots of listing sites have great map features, but just as one might use both Tinder & OkCupid to cast the widest net, most users aren’t interested in sticking with one real estate site.
With Wayhome, you don’t have to settle down: once you save an apartment, we plot it on your map, right next to the other apartments you & your pals have saved, and any important places you’ve added (say: work, or maybe school).
Photos
Apartment listings with fewer than 5 photos shouldn’t exist in 2017. When you find a listing online, you want to see deal-breakers front & center. Listings with no pictures always feel like they’re hiding something, and the last thing you want is to waste your time getting apartment-catfished.
When you save an apartment with Wayhome, the app uses fancy science to find any other listings for that apartment our users have seen. If those listings had pics that the ad you’ve found doesn’t, we’ll show you.
Most will still want to visit their favorite places in-person, but with Wayhome, they’ll waste a lot less time viewing the duds.
Next up!
We’ve packed our roadmap with lots of cool stuff, from helping users message agents, to finding & showing a listing’s real street address. We think tech’s been too interested in helping landlords & agents lately, and we’re really excited to start fixing the renter side of the market once & for all.
So, check us out. During our early beta tests, Wayhome only works for people moving to the Boston area. If you’ve got an idea of where we ought to focus on next (or a feature you’d like to see), let me know in the comments.
Happy 4th!
