First of all guys - thank you very much for the great job well done. You’re the best by far and we’re eager to become and stay your clients forever.
As we aren’t considering any services besides yours, it is in our best interest to try to make it even better. Speaking of which, we were shocked to find out that you don’t have a filter by property type. Even much smaller agencies have this option, so lack of it does no good neither for your appearance nor for our convenience/efficiency. For example, we’re looking for a house now and it is a pain to constantly go through all those flats and terraced houses.
Also, we need a garage, so having such a checkbox would not hurt at all.
Actually, it would have been much faster and easier for me to create those filters for you myself, for free, if only I would have been allowed, than struggle through all unwanted listings all the time.
Finally, I have to say that I do appreciate the fact that you have courage and honesty to put a DSS filter in place. It’s not like we ever needed it, it just puts you distinctly aside from everyone else, who are trying to pretend that the problem is not there or even worse - to ban a terminology entirely in an attempt of false care of those, who need it.
Hi Andy, thanks for your comments. We have often taken on board comments from the Community and put them straight into product improvements, so this is really valuable!
Yes you’re right – you can’t filter by property type at the moment. I’ll pass it on the the team that you’d find this useful. I’m sure many other users would too. As you can see, we do list the type of property in the property description headers on the search results pages. E.g. ‘terraced house’. A work around for the moment could be using crtl+f and the property type you need. Not ideal though, I admit.
The garage thing is a good idea, too. Slightly trickier there as we try to minimise the amount of boxes landlords have to tick when uploading their properties so that they have a good user experience, too. But I’ll definitely pass this on.
Thanks for your comments about ‘DSS’. It’s an issue we care about a lot. There’s lots of info about our approach to it here. we do think that, given the current legislative environment, giving tenants the ability to quickly find landlords who are explicitly to accept ‘DSS’ tenants means that those tenants have a better experience finding a home.
We totally agree - merely banning the terminology without first ending the causes of discrimination would just make it harder for tenant claiming benefits to find a home.
Sam, it is most kind of you to give such an extensive and warm answer, especially at the weekend. I really appreciate.
I have another question about the current bedrooms filter though, or to be more precise about the way you allow landlords to advertise single rooms for let. If you’d go to your platform, choose London, set bedrooms to 2-6 Bed and sorting to Price: Low to High meaning you’re looking for an apartment or a house with 2-6 bedrooms, the first bunch of ads would be just single rooms lettings, which is obviously NOT what you were looking for. Even the titles are quite misleading, like 4 Bed Detached House, Rondu Road, NW2 while in reality, it is just a room in this house. Actually, some went as far as not even mentioning that this is a single room and not an entire apartment, probably assuming one should guess it oneself from the price https://www.openrent.co.uk/property-to-rent/london/4-bed-detached-house-rondu-road-nw2/533624
But what is even more important, say I would report all of them to you and you’d have them all change the title to say something like A Room in a Shared Flat, Akerman Road, SW9. Even that action would not do any good to filter results because they’d still state Bedrooms: 4 under the Overview section, and this is exactly why they’re popping up after the 2+ bed filter.
With all my respect, don’t you think it is kind of unprofessional showing single rooms to a family of four, who are looking for a 2+ bedroom apartment?
My point is - I don’t think it should be allowed to put anything that is not included in the price under the Overview section (like other bedrooms, or people restrictions for an entire house Maximum Tenants: 12 while letting a single room). Do you?
Looking for a house and have just received an automatic letter from your platform with only flats. Useless.
I can’t believe you’re deliberately losing such a huge competitive edge that is very easy to implement, especially keeping in mind that everyone else has it. (The Type of the property filter).
Btw, with that, you would immediately solve the problem of a dirty search you have now (single rooms in shared flats always popping up in 2+ bed houses/apartments search results).
Hi Andy, your initial comments here have been passed on and this is something we are looking at. I appreciate things may not change quickly enough to help with your house-hunt however, and that must be frustrating. We are addressing this though, and we have a good track record of putting in improvements.
Just one thing to bear in mind is that we’re growing incredibly quickly. Last week he hit 10,000 properties live for the first time. Search functionality which worked well last year when we were on 5,000 properties may now need building on, and comments from you and others are really helpful in directing us in those improvements.
Hello,
jumping on the request train to ask if a “sort by newest update” or a filter which filters properties updated more than 3 days ago (like they have it on rightmove and zoopla) certainly would make easier to look for a flat.
I’ve been looking for a flat for a quite uncomfortable long time (and my moving date approaches) I am literally struggling at the moment to keep up with the speed of the market, I’ve literally (no joke) lost a flat even before the landlord started to allow viewings for it since people are putting down holding deposit as soon flat pop out.
Said that, I would find it useful if I can focus on very fresh properties and be one of the first to contact the landlord.
If what you want is to be able to find out as soon as new properties are added, you can create a search alert which will tell you whenever a new property that meets your search criteria goes live. That’s the best way to do it. That email will often go out before a property has even gone live on Rightmove or Zoopla.
We have a few reasons for not sorting properties by newest to oldest. I have written them all up here!
