HomeBro: AI searching the rental property. 50000 plus daily.

By Lev Klebanov
I am developing a housing search service https://homebro.ru

The text is published with the permission of the author.
The original text is here.

My eye twitched when I tried to find an apartment for my parents. No longer:
I have launched the HomeBro website, which searches for apartments on all the top real estate listing sites. All property offers on one map, plus notifications sent to Telegram.

Hi! My name is Lev. Four years ago, I created the HomeBro bot that searches for housing for free and sends you options directly to Telegram. I’ve rented an apartment in Moscow many times, and I desperately wanted to simplify this process. As a result, half a million people have already used the bot.

HomeBro: AI searching the rental property. 50,000 daily listings. 16

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This time, I was helping my parents buy an apartment. And here I felt firsthand how our bot is not sufficient for the process of buying a property.

It was both amusing and bitter that as the founder of a housing search service, with access to a database of all property listings, I couldn’t conveniently explore it myself.

I wanted something simple. To not only receive new options in the bot but also to open a map and see everything available on the market. In the end, once again, like four years ago, I find myself opening websites one after another. I see the same thing 10 times in an attempt to find something new. In short, it’s a mess.

I looked at 17 advertisements about this apartment.
Did you find it without commission?

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HomeBro: And then, with the team, we created a real estate classifieds aggregator website.

Welcome to the HomeBro portal! Here, you’ll find all the latest listings from Cian, Domclick, Yandex.Real Estate, M2, Avito, and Samolet.Plus. And the list will continue to grow.

Currently, the site has over 1 million active listings, with 50 thousand new ones appearing every day.

You can already visit and search for housing for rent or purchase in 18 cities. It covers all Russian million-plus cities, including Sochi and Arkhangelsk – where one of our developers lives =)

And all this without duplicates. Well, almost =D Each housing option is shown only once.

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It’s interesting, will they provide a preferential IT mortgage for rental properties?

Also, our trained neural network (I wrote about it here) helps find an apartment without grandma’s renovation, closer to the park, or farther from the roads. Well, or you can deliberately look for a fixer-upper to buy cheaper and renovate.

Setting up notifications for all new listings can be done in two clicks (literally) by transitioning from the website to our bot.

Yes, did you make something really cool?

Hey, folks, the thing is working, but this is the very first version, commonly known as MVP.

We, with a very small team, have been building the portal since the beginning of the year; there are still some glitches. But there’s no point in hiding from people a service that, even in its current form, can bring real benefits.

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A big thank you to everyone supporting us in our crowdfunding campaign; every ruble of yours is important to us. By the way, we almost didn’t promote it—mentioned it only in one article and did a one-time mailing in the bot. It triggered me when someone said, “You’re begging for money on VC.” As a result, we stopped writing about it. But I was wrong; haters gonna hate.

Welcome to all the found bugs. Visit the HomeBro website and don’t hesitate to say what you felt was lacking. I’ll be incredibly grateful for your comments.