A group of Ukrainian tech entrepreneurs have created a new service to help people around the world find their ideal living space, via cyberspace.
Called Flatfy, the service is a search engine for
apartment sale and rental offers, with users able to filter results by price,
location, area, and other features. The service covers 10 countries so far,
with another 15 planned to come online soon.
The service was developed by Stanislav
Skliarovskyi, Denis Tsyganok and Andrey Mima, former students of Taras
Shevchenko National University’s Faculty of Cybernetics.
The three first got into the online real estate
business in 2009, when they launched LUN.ua, which stands for Luchshaya
Ukrainskaya Nedvizhemost (Best Ukrainian Real Estate). It’s a Russian-language
website that allows users to search for apartments in Ukraine’s major cities —
Kyiv, Lviv, Odesa, Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk. It now has about 2.5 million
users a month.
Inspired by that success, Skliarovskyi, Tsyganok,
and Mima decided to broaden their horizons. Their new product, at flatfy.com,
is basically an automated version of LUN.ua for 10 countries — Eastern Europe,
along with Russia, Kazakhstan, and Turkey. The Flatfy team plans to expand its
geography to 25 countries, adding ones in Asia, Africa, and South America.
The flatfy.com homepage links to an individual
Flatfy page for each of the countries covered, which is in the language of that
country. They work in the same way that LUN.ua does, and at the moment the
Ukraine link simply takes you to LUN.ua.
There’s no English version of the site yet, as
none of the countries covered are English-speaking. According to Mima, people
who are looking for a long-term rent deal, or who want to buy an apartment,
mostly search in the local language anyway. Moreover, as modern web-browsers
can automatically translate Web pages into a user’s native language, the
international language barrier has lowered in cyberspace in recent years.
Tsyganok, who is the CEO of LUN.ua, says his
company aims to attract 10 million users a month to flatfy.com by 2018.
“This goal inspires us to run quickly to the
office in the morning,” his companion Mima jokes.
The website’s search engine gathers up all of the
classifieds for apartments for sale and rent that it finds on real estate websites in a
particular country, filtering out duplicates and potential fraudsters.
According to Mima, the search algorithm flags suspicious offers – ones in which
the prices are much lower than average, or which appear to have faked photos,
or which have already been reported as scams.
“Our real estate search engine solves the
problems that still exist in other countries, but that we have already solved
in Ukraine,” Mima say. “Normally, users have to search through dozens of
websites, repeatedly entering the same information. But we gather all of the
ads together in one place.”
The company earns revenues from directing Web
traffic to the websites whose ads are aggregated, effectively being paid for
each mouse click that helps connects flat-seekers with landlords, and buyers
with sellers.
A new-build catalogue offered by LUN.ua has
up-to-the-minute information about all current housing construction projects in
Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities. The LUN.ua team updates information on each
building once a month, and workers drive around the city taking fresh pictures
of ongoing constructions.
LUN.ua also offers a service called “Neighbors”
(located at sosedi.lun.ua), with which users can create stylish infographics to
attract potential flat mates, or for flat owners to use to advertise their
property without having to go through agents.
Flatfy.com doesn’t have a new-build catalog for
each country, as that would require having people on the ground in the various
countries it covers. But there are plans to expand the “Neighbors” service to
the flatfy.com site.
Mima says more than 50,000 people have created
such ads using LUN.ua’s app, and shared them on Facebook and its Russian-clone
social network, Vkontakte.
That helps the company to promote itself on
social media, as well as put LUN.ua in the top results of the Google search
engine, because lots of people share the link to the website along with their
infographics.
Tsyganok says that the main reason the company
succeeded in Ukraine was that it created a service focused only on flat-seekers
– real estate agencies can’t even place any ads on the website.
“We cut ourselves off from the one half of the
(real estate) market in order to make the service better for the other half,”
Tsyganok says.
“There is an old joke about the writer who saw a
beautiful lawn and asked the gardener how he managed to grow it,” Mima chips
in. “The gardener said that all he needed to do was just water and trim it once
a day – for 300 years. It’s the same with our company. We’re working day-by-day
to make our service better.”
Kyiv Post staff
writer Anna Yakutenko can be reached at [email protected]. The Kyiv Post’s
IT coverage is sponsored by Beetroot, Ciklum, Steltec Capital, 1World Online
and SoftServe. The content is independent of the donors.
