Selling guaranteed appartment viewings
Hey everyone,
there came an idea to my mind. I was searching for more than a year for a flat in Berlin. Sure, I had some special requirements, but also if you just want a 1 room appartment here in Berlin, it's hard to find. The market is crazy and the only thing you need to have is: luck. Luck for getting an answer on your appartment request, luck for getting an invitation for an appartment viewing and even more luck for finally sign the appartment. It's just crazy in Germany, and specially in Berlin.
There are a lot of real estate listing sites, each of them has huge traffic and a lot of recently updated listings. Pretty much all of them work the same way: you can create a free account there and make a "request"/send an email to the listing-owner asking for an appointment or more details. I'm not joking when I'm telling you that I heard from a few friends that their listing had 300-500 request within the first hour! crazy
Idea
I'd buy appartment-viewing-appointments (e.g. 5-10 per appartment) from estate agents/private people, who are looking for a new tenant.
User can create an account and select zip codes where he's searching for an appartment. Each selected zip code costs e.g. $5/m. Now he's receiving like minimim (guaranteed) of 5 appointment-offers each week within each zip code. For each of this offers he's able to make a guaranteed viewing-appointment directly in the app. The offer is just available until all 5-10 appointments are
not yet taken.
Just an idea. But I like it so far. Would appreciate any valuable feedback on this.
Best regards from Berlin,
You are trying to solve a two-sided market problem: Very profitable if solved because you can corner the market, low demands on tech side, very hard to create the market.
You will need good a strategy too bootstrap/create your market.
Thanks for your feedback, makes sense!
@vince552 were are doing what you describe. Do you want to drop me an email, lets talk about possible cooperation?
Ah, good to know! Do you do it locally? Do you have an url of your project? Would love to talk about it! I'll send you an email later. Thanks for reaching out!
Good points @mykal_machon.
In the U.S. there are definitely laws preventing specific forms of discrimination. Even on Facebook I am not able to target [real estate] ads based on race, religion, etc... But it doesn't sound like that would be your case as the people buying the leads are simply accepting appointments. But it would be a life saver to already have them pre-screened in other areas.
Over all though, @vince552 has an awesome idea and I would pay for it! Especially if I could apply it to the commercial real estate side of things
Thanks for your feedback Frederick! :-)
Hey, i also live in berlin.
I think your idea is very interesting, but you have to make sure, that the agents or people you want to buy apartment viewings from, are actually willing to sell.
If I would be an estate agent/private person, I would just show you an apartment even though I already sold it or it isn't even for sell.
You should propably think about checks to prevent those fraudulent practices.
One way to hopefully prevent that in the first place would be to only work with established real estate agents/companies.
But because the estate agents earn massive amounts if they sell an apartment or find a tenant. They propably would have to make at least a 100$ per viewing to make it interesting for them.
I think the idea is very interesting and there are definetly issues in the real estate industry that need to be solved!
Thanks for your valuable feedback! Yeah, I'm currently also thinking about a good pricing model. Not that easy.
This comment was deleted 3 years ago
Thanks a lot for your feedback! Will reach out to some estate agents and see what they think about it.