Everything HomeScout Can Do (And Why I Built It After Moving to Dublin)

Originally published on Medium.

I moved from the Netherlands to Dublin about two years ago. I had a job lined up, a rough idea of which neighbourhoods looked interesting, and what I thought was a reasonable budget. What I did not have was any idea how broken the rental search experience in this city actually is.

Within the first week I was refreshing Daft.ie on my phone during work meetings, copy-pasting the same inquiry email to thirty letting agents, and genuinely losing sleep over apartments I missed because I did not check listings fast enough. Coming from Amsterdam I thought I knew expensive rental markets. Dublin turned out to be worse, with fewer tools to help you make sense of it.

After about a month of this, I started building HomeScout. Not because I wanted to launch a startup. Because I was tired of the way things worked and I knew they could be better. I ended up using HomeScout to find my own apartment.

The Problem Nobody Was Solving

You land in Dublin, you need a place to live, you open Daft.ie. It's the main listing site. Everyone uses it. And the search is terrible.

You know exactly what you want. A two-bedroom apartment near Google Docks, under €2,000, that allows pets. Simple enough. Instead of typing that sentence, you get 15 dropdown menus. Location picker. Min price. Max price. Bedrooms. Property type. And even after clicking through all of those, the results don't really match what you asked for.

The first five pages are dominated by expensive new-build developments. Shiny complexes charging €3,000-plus for a one-bed. The normal, affordable apartments that regular people actually rent are buried deep in the results.

Then there's the pricing problem. You find a one-bed in Rathmines listed at €1,800. Is that a good deal? Overpriced? About to go up? You have no way to know. No area data, no comparison tools, no market intelligence. You're making one of the biggest financial decisions of your month completely blind.

If you do find a place, the lease arrives. Forty pages of legal text. Clauses about things you've never heard of. Is this break clause normal in Ireland? Is that deposit retention term a red flag? You could hire a solicitor, but not for every lease you review.

Meanwhile you're emailing twenty-plus agents. Replies arrive at random times. Your inbox becomes chaos. It's a full-time job alongside your actual full-time job. Good properties disappear within hours. If you're not refreshing every twenty minutes, you miss them. Every inquiry email you send looks like everyone else's, one of fifty identical messages in the agent's inbox.

I dealt with all of this firsthand. Not as a product researcher. As a frustrated renter who could not believe how bad the experience was. So I built HomeScout to fix it. All of it.

What I Built to Fix It

Search That Understands English

This was the first thing I built, because it was the first thing that drove me up the wall. On HomeScout, you type what you want in plain English. "2 bed apartment in Rathmines under 2000 that allows pets." The AI picks up on what you mean and returns matching listings. No dropdowns. No guessing which filter combination might work.

You can be as specific or as vague as you want. "Something near a DART station with a balcony" works just as well as "3 bed house in Drumcondra between 1800 and 2200." The search adapts to how you think about your housing needs rather than forcing you into rigid categories.

AI Match Score + Value Score: Know If It's a Good Deal

Every property gets two scores. The AI Match Score tells you how well a listing fits what you actually asked for, explained in plain language ("matches your commute, over budget by €150, no balcony"). The Value Score tells you whether the asking rent is fair for that neighbourhood, based on comparable properties, location quality, condition, and BER energy rating.

No more guessing. No more overpaying because you didn't know the going rate for a two-bed in Stoneybatter. Agents and landlords have always had more information than tenants. These two scores finally flip the table.

AI Rental Agent: Stop Refreshing, Start Living

This one changed how I think about apartment hunting entirely. You describe your dream property once, budget, area, bedrooms, whatever matters, and the AI Rental Agent scans the market around the clock. The moment something matching your criteria appears, you get notified.

No more refreshing Daft every twenty minutes during your lunch break. No more missing a perfect apartment because you were in a meeting when it was listed. If you want to go further, the Agent can auto-send your pre-approved inquiry template the moment a match lands (capped at 5 sends per day with a kill switch on every email). The Dublin market moves fast, a good two-bed can get fifty inquiries in the first hour. Being notified instantly makes a real difference.

AI Contract Review: Your 30-Second Solicitor

You get a lease. It's forty pages. You upload the PDF to HomeScout. Within thirty seconds the AI has read every clause, flagged potential red flags, checked RPZ (Rent Pressure Zone) compliance, and highlighted anything unusual compared to standard Irish leases.

Is that deposit clause normal? Is this break clause fair? Can the landlord actually do that inspection thing? You get clear answers without booking a solicitor appointment. It doesn't replace legal advice for complex situations, but for the "is this lease reasonable?" question that every renter has, it's exactly what you need.

Smart Inbox: One Place for All Agent Communication

Instead of losing track of twenty email threads across your personal inbox, all your agent communication lives in one organised place inside HomeScout. Every conversation tied to the property it's about, with full history.

The real power is in AI email generation and reply analysis. When you reach out to an agent, the AI drafts a personalised inquiry using your renter profile, your employment status, your move-in timeline, relevant details that make you sound like a serious, organised applicant. Not a generic "Hi, is this still available?" that agents get hundreds of per day.

When the agent replies, the AI reads it, classifies the sentiment (positive / negative / needs info), and suggests next actions. You review everything before it sends. You can edit it, change the tone, add details. Nothing goes out without your approval.

Viewing Scheduler: No More Calendar Chaos

When you're viewing five or six properties in a week, keeping track of when and where becomes its own challenge. HomeScout has a built-in viewing scheduler with ICS calendar export. Book viewings, export them to your calendar, get reminders, and track which ones you've attended and what you thought of each.

Simple. But when I was hunting I once showed up to a viewing on the wrong day because I'd mixed up two properties in my head. That doesn't happen when everything is organised in one system.

Renter Resume: Stand Out From the Crowd

Dublin's rental market is brutally competitive. When an agent has fifty applications for one apartment, anything that makes you look more prepared and professional helps.

Your renter resume on HomeScout is a digital profile with your employment details, references, and key documents. When you apply for a property, you can share your complete profile with one click instead of rewriting your life story and attaching the same documents every single time. Faster for you, better impression on the agent.

Document Vault: Everything in One Secure Place

Payslips in your email. Lease in your downloads folder. Reference letter somewhere on your phone. Every application means hunting through folders and inboxes for the same files.

HomeScout's document vault is encrypted storage for all your rental documents, AES-256-GCM at rest, key derived per user. Leases, payslips, employer references, ID copies. When an agent asks for your last three payslips, you open the vault and share them. Your sensitive financial documents aren't sitting in a regular cloud folder.

Market Scout: Understand Dublin Before You Search

If you're new to Dublin, you probably don't know the difference between Rathmines and Ranelagh, or why Phibsborough costs half of what Ballsbridge does. Market Scout (formerly Area Explorer) is an interactive choropleth map of 28 Dublin neighbourhoods, colour-coded by real rent data and overlaid with 63 landmark markers.

Before you even run your first search, you can explore the city and understand what different areas actually cost. Orientation that takes weeks to figure out on your own, available in thirty seconds.

Property Comparison + Price History

Saved properties get side-by-side comparison mode and a price-history sparkline, so you can see whether that €2,100 listing was €1,850 three months ago. Useful both for knowing what's moving and for politely asking an agent why the price jumped.

What's Free and What's Not

I wanted HomeScout to be genuinely useful even if you never pay a cent.

Explorer (Free, forever):

• 20 AI searches per month
• 5 saved properties
• 1 lifetime free AI contract review
• 1 active AI Rental Agent brief + 1 match per week (blurred previews for the rest)
• No Market Scout, no viewing scheduler, no email drafting

Enough to get a feel for the platform, try the AI search, and run one contract through the review.

HomeScout (€17.99/month, or €42.99 Season Pass for 3 months):

• Unlimited AI searches, saved properties, saved searches, AI email drafting
• Full Market Scout access
• Unlimited AI Rental Agent (with auto-apply, 5 sends/day cap)
• Unlimited AI contract review
• Viewing scheduler + ICS calendar export
• Commute calculator
• Unlimited document vault
• Property comparison + advanced filters
• Priority support

The Season Pass works out to roughly €14.33/month, designed for the realistic length of a Dublin apartment hunt. I priced it below the cost of a single solicitor consultation because the tools should be accessible to normal renters.

Team plans are per-seat with volume discounts for relocation teams and HR departments moving multiple people into Dublin.

Try It Yourself

If any of this resonated with your own experience of apartment hunting in Dublin, give HomeScout a try. The free Explorer plan doesn't require a credit card.

I built this because I was tired of fighting with Daft.ie at 11pm on a Tuesday, wondering if that apartment in Stoneybatter was fairly priced or if I was about to get ripped off. If that sounds familiar, you'll probably get a lot out of it. And if you end up catching a listing twenty minutes after it goes live because the AI Rental Agent pinged you while you were actually enjoying your lunch break instead of doom-scrolling Daft, that's exactly why I built the thing.