A new rental property platform that allows prospective tenants to ‘swipe’ in Tinder style for rooms and homes has had 100,000 searches.

PerchPeek launched last September but only expanded across London last month.

It now has over 6,000 properties in both London and Guildford, with further expansion planned this year. It claims to save renters over 30 hours of search time.

Co-founded by Paul Bennett who started by managing his mother’s small property portfolio in Guildford, PerchPeek currently has over 175 letting agents and private landlords listing on it, with the large majority of listings provided by agents.

Listing providers pay nothing until a tenancy results. Agents can upload their entire portfolio for free and only pay when one is taken. They also apparently don’t mind sharing a platform with landlords uploading direct, as the site has so far concentrated its efforts on agent recruitment.

Perch Peek also uses machine learning.

When a renter comes to PerchPeek, they begin swiping.

They ‘swipe’ right for properties they like and left for those they don’t.

Throughout the swiping process the app will pop up with lifestyle questions like ‘What’s your favourite type of music/film/food?’

This allows PerchPeek’s machine learning technology to recommend properties to tenants based on their personality, search patterns and data profile.

Searchers can also ‘heart’ and ‘cross’ properties: ‘hearting’ a property means that the prospective tenant would like to see other similar properties, whereas ‘crossing’ means they would like to avoid comparable properties.

Property listings can also be shared with friends via social media. Viewings and offers can be made online, while documentation can also be arranged via the platform, where documents can be stored.

Co-founder Paul Bennett formerly worked in business development at Amazon and says that when struggling to find a property for himself, he saw at first-hand the need for a “high performing property marketplace which streamlined the renting experience for both the supplier and tenant and used data at the heart of its offering”.

So far over 150 tenants have found their property through the platform, which has received backing from PiLabs.

https://www.perchpeek.com/