The expensive hunt for a property:
On one occasion, he spent £25 on the cab journey to see a house that looked great in the online ad, but on arrival, he was met by unfriendly roommates, torn carpets, and a leaky roof. He left within minutes only to be relieved of a further £25 for the return cab trip.
This was just one property. To finally find a nice one, he had to reject over ten such properties. He wasted exactly £207.67 on cabs (he still has the receipts) and hours of his precious time on the road.
The idea behind ViewEase
When one of our founders moved from Australia to London, he ended up spending a week and a half in a hotel and half of his life savings on cabs in the quest to find a nice house to rent.
He looked at dozens of properties online. The rooms looked good on screen, but when he went to view them in person, he ended up having to reject them because of problems like mould, damp, dodgy landlords, and even a smelly pet dog!
What Forrest Gump once said about life, we say about online ads: "Property ads are like a box of chocolates - you never know what you are going to get."
This made us think that there had to be a cheaper and more efficient way to narrow down the property search, and pay a holding deposit on a good property without having to unnecessarily waste money and time.
Over a beer and a discussion with his eventual landlord, the two decided to come up with a solution to this problem together.
His landlord told him a story of one of his previous tenants who rented his London property while still in India after sending his London-based cousin, who came with a phone to live stream the property to him. If he didn't have his cousin in London, he would have had to fly to London, stay at a hotel, spend money on cabs and hours on the road to do multiple property visits. Because of the help of his cousin and the live stream, he was able to put down a deposit and secure the property from the comfort of his home in Delhi. He literally got off the plane and went directly to his new house.
The landlord realised the worldwide potential in having a greater selection of people to view his properties in this way. The two founders recognised that this concept will help both tenants and agents/landlords.
That is when ViewEase was born.