New app to make house renting easier

A new app has been developed to help make house hunting easier for students in Canterbury.

Polygon, a start-up company run by student for students, aims to revolutionise the way students interact with landlords and letting agents.

The company state on their Facebook page how ‘You will never again go through the hair-pulling stress of digging through unhelpful websites for hours, just to find a place to live.

'Our sole purpose: to give students an awesome place to live, with housemates that will become lifelong.’

Erald Makoli explained how the application works with an innovative quota mechanism that matches students according to their personality and preferences.

Polygon is a free app that brings together properties from Canterbury’s letting agents to students onto one platform. It then lets you look through and see when they’re available for viewing (swipe up to see viewing calendar), to shortlist for later (swipe right) or see next (swipe left).

‘Polygon also has an algorithm for people looking just for rooms rather than whole places that matches you with the people you’d fit best with - night in/night out, clean freak/plates everywhere, friends over/quiet nights in, that kind of thing.’

The app’s development comes following a spate of incidents between student tenants and landlords. This is Money revealed this week how rogue landlords are routinely and illegally withholding deposits and subjecting tenants to surprise evictions, with half of students failing to get their cash back.

Washington Ali, a Law Student, Property Investor, and Polygon’s president, said ‘We are putting the power back in the hands of students by creating an app where students find the best homes and housemates of which they can develop lasting friendships. This is as pivotal to the student experience as it is important for landlords themselves.

‘We also have a chat room on our app where students can talk to us about an unresolved problem as this allows better flows of communication and conflict resolution if problems were to occur. I can assure happy tenants mean a happy landlord!’

‘There is a lack of transparency and openness between students and landlords. We want to change that and focus the attention on the student,’ said T.K. Gondo, who, before becoming Co-founder and CEO of Polygon, worked in offshore banking after dropping out of Canterbury Christ Church University.

At the time of writing, the company has partnerships with a number of local and national estate agencies, such as Leydon Lettings, Godwin Curtis, Your Move, and Miles & Barr. They have also been in a close working relationship with universities and their respective student unions to help develop and promote the app.

Down the line, the company wish to expand beyond Canterbury and work alongside other businesses. Gondo explained: ‘In Canterbury, we are aiming to have more properties on our application than any competing service.’