Very very sorry to hear this. I spoke to him twice and exchanged a few WhatsApp messages with him in August. I was in the S20 batch and he was interested in angel investing in my startup.
He told me about how his life had changed with his recent baby. We discovered that my brother and his wife had worked at the same law firm. He was a genuinely nice guy.
You're right, I should do the math on trxn costs in my next update - the main ones are stamp duty on purchase and broker fees on sale. The minor ones are moving costs and legal fees on buying and selling. Capex I'll have to ignore because I have no data on this.
Still, if you assume the broker got paid say 1.5%-2.0%, the stamp duty was 3.5-4.0%, there's still a sizeable margin in between.
Limited by data here unfortunately. The data source I'm using is Land Registry, which only shows successful deals. Regarding transaction costs, in the UK its around 1.5% for broker fees, plus moving and legal costs. There's also capital gains tax on profits generated on the sale, which is a complex mathematic, and applies if its 'not your first home'. And stamp duty (varies by price) which you pay on purchase.
I understand all of your points, and from what you're saying, with the fee levels you've described, it does sound like the UK is different from Canada.
Negative data would be very helpful, unfortunately its harder to get. The data I used was from Land Registry UK which only captures successful transactions.
Hm, no we are not an estate agency :) Not yet. I was just curious about whether the widely held belief that short term sales are disadvantageous to home owners is true or not, thats what motivated the post.
> My guess is that it will push you to use products where the app gets a commission.
Not really - the whole idea is to provide unbiased and honest advice. The kind that your best friend would give you. We don't make any referral fees. Maybe this changes later, but we'll have to think hard about how to do it without diluting what we're trying to do.
> Also, i dont understand the SMS part, cant you just offer the advice on the home page with a chat UI ?
Web based chat UI is hard for us to do now because we need to check every response manually before it goes out. This takes time. A few hours, maybe more. With web based chatbots, people expect instant responses. If we try to be instant, we will end up compromising on accuracy, which is something we don't want to do right now. With SMS, our feeling is that people are used to waiting.. the expectation for speed of response is a bit lower than what it is for web based chatbots, which suits us well for now.
Hi, founder here. Feedback noted and I'll try to explain the concept a bit better. In London, which is where I am, if you rent a flat as a company - which a lot of international companies do, for their employees - you get treated really well by letting agents + landlords. As a corporate renter you generally don't have to pay a security deposit; you get favourable contractual terms; and you only need to provide your financial and other documents once. All in all it's much easier and better to rent as a corporate vs renting as an individual. So there is an arbitrage opportunity. We enable individuals to capture this arbitrage opportunity. We provide the 'company' which rents the flat - whichever flat you want - for you.
Had to start somewhere and given the time sensitive nature of the flat search process it felt like mobile was something we really couldn't live/launch without
He told me about how his life had changed with his recent baby. We discovered that my brother and his wife had worked at the same law firm. He was a genuinely nice guy.
Very sad to see this news.