The point is not to show you more flats. It is to show you fewer.
A couple in Berlin who have been looking for fourteen months. A family that needs a specific school catchment. A man buying his mother a flat in another city. Two people buying to renovate. They are all exhausted in the same particular way, and they have all started to lower their standards without noticing.
Saturday and Sunday morning, on portals, scrolling the same forty flats. The good listings are gone within hours, so the weekend habit guarantees they only ever see what nobody wanted. Meanwhile every listing they do like takes forty minutes to evaluate — the Exposé, the Hausgeld, the Energieausweis, the commute, the true purchase cost — and they do that forty-minute job maybe twice a week, badly, at midnight.
- Watching every relevant portal continuously and catching a new listing in minutes
- Deduplicating: the same flat listed by three agents at three prices
- Applying hard constraints — rooms, area, floor, lift, budget, district
- Reading the Exposé: Hausgeld, Wohnfläche, Baujahr, heating, Energieausweis, Erbpacht, Denkmalschutz, Sanierungsstau
- Computing the true entry cost — Grunderwerbsteuer, Notar and Grundbuch, Courtage — the number that is usually 10–12% above the headline
- Door-to-door commute times to real addresses at real times of day
- Assembling the viewing brief and keeping a record of why each flat was rejected
- Whether you would be happy living there
- What it is worth to you
- How much to bid, and whether to buy at all
- The watcher
- Runs continuously. New listings that pass your hard constraints arrive by message within minutes, not on Saturday. This alone changes the outcome more than everything else combined, because in Berlin the queue forms in the first two hours.
- The rejecter
- The part people find strange and then love. It throws listings away and tells you why: "Erbpacht until 2061 — you said no." "Hausgeld €610 for 68m² — outside your ceiling." The rejected pile stays visible but collapsed, so you can see it was not careless.
- The true-cost line
- Every surviving listing carries one number: what leaving the notary actually costs, and the monthly figure at your stated deposit — with the rate as an input you set, not one I invent.
- The viewing brief
- One page per flat: the eight things to check in this building’s era — 1900 Altbau, 60s, Plattenbau and Neubau each have their own list — the six questions for the agent, and the two documents to request.
- The rejection memory
- After eleven viewings people forget why they said no to number four. The record prevents the slow, unnoticed lowering of standards.
It never tells you whether to buy, and it never touches money.
No valuation opinion, no "this is underpriced", no financing recommendation. I am not a financial adviser and neither is the software. It computes what is arithmetic and hands the decision back untouched. Where a listing looks anomalous it says anomalous and suggests asking a professional — it does not conclude.
It also does not contact agents. Enquiries are drafted; you send them.
Viewings per hundred listings seen, which should rise sharply. Minutes from listing published to enquiry sent. Weekend hours on portals, which should go to zero.
When the budget and the requirements cannot both be true. The system would then simply produce silence, week after week, which is a cruel way to learn it. I say it in week one instead, with the arithmetic on the table.
Nothing weekly. The constraints session is the whole price.
Fourteen months of Saturdays on portals, looking at the same forty flats, slowly agreeing to things we had said we would never agree to. The constraints session was two hours and it was mostly an argument between the two of us, which I now think was the actual product. After that we stopped looking at listings entirely — things arrived within minutes of going online and the ones that did not qualify were thrown away with a reason written next to them. We saw nine flats instead of forty and bought the seventh.
What I needed was the real number, not the price in the headline. It showed me the Grunderwerbsteuer, the Notar, the Hausgeld, the whole thing, and two flats we were excited about turned out to be outside what we could carry. He was very clear that he would not tell us whether to buy and would not touch the financing, which at the time felt like a limitation and later felt like the reason I trusted the rest.
Tell me what your week looks like.
I'll tell you honestly which parts you can hand over — and which you can't.