This year my partner and I have been looking into buying an apartment and we quickly realised that the tools to help that process were severly lacking.
Problems and issues when buying apartments
Problem 1: which area to look into
We’re quite new to the Helsinki region, so we didn’t have much understanding of the areas, their costs, what kind of houses does the area have, when they were built (to avoid immediate plumbing renovation), pros and cons etc.
I made a bookmarklet to scrape the basic listing details from Tori.fi (this was when they still had apartments) and a simple index.html web app to display, filter and look into the data. This allowed for quick exploration of the data and understand the market better.
I’ve yet to release the tool and maybe won’t at all, since scraping the data is still manual and somewhat tedious.
Problem 2: keeping track of apartments and related details
The WhatsApp chat we had for apartment details quickly turned into a mess and was hard to follow comments and thoughts of different apartments. We also tried Google Docs, but that didn’t get updated often enough and adding details there was a chore. Solving this issue turned into a quite clear specification list:
- Keeping track of what apartment has been viewed, notes and thoughts from apartments, contact details of realtors etc,
- Sharing the list with partner so that both can participate equally
- Estimates of monthly costs with housing company maintenance fee and loan costs
- Recalculate costs with your own offer price
- See and compare the price to the average sale price of the area
- Show relevant details of the apartment
Good friend of mine, Jakub, also got interested in solving this issue, so we worked together to make this tool in cafe’s and in the interesting corners of Oodi during weekends.
As software developers & designers, we made it into an app.
Features
- Add apartment and house listings by pasting Oikotie.fi links
- Add your own comments, such as notes from the apartments, viewing times and realtor details
- Share list of apartments with a link
- Calculate cost estimates for loan
- You can put your own finances & bank loan details to easily get estimates for all listings you’ve added
- Default percentage or custom downpayment amount
- Calculates the % of income spent on living costs
- Gives a euro per square metre per month estimate that is comparable between apartments regardless of size
- Show square metre price development for the area by postal code
- Displays most relevant information such as year it was built, square metre price, property ownership, floor number and the amount of apartments in the housing company
- Listings have links to Google Maps & housing company details
Rest of the details can be expanded:
Tech
- Next.js web app with Bun & Elysia based backend. Drizzle ORM was enough to implement the database queries.
- SQLite database to keep things simple & light
- Running cost of ~4-5€ per month for a VPS, ~35€ one time purchase for domain.
Available for free at kämpät.com
Feedback and feature requests are highly welcome! You can send them via email or through the social media of your choice to @Joonikko