Get paid by landlords to remove negative reviews, like yelp. Offer to show all reviews, even removed ones, to renters that pay for the premium service.

Ew, I feel gross after coming up with that idea.

shake down bad landlords to delete bad reviews.

charge landlords for priority in search results.

sell searcher info as marketing data.

sell search trends as financial early indicators to hedge funds.

expand to HOA reviews for neighborhoods.

Real estate advertising, surely?

Nonprofit ... crowd funded... build it and all you need afterward are paying for servers. Then you're just doing donations like Wikipedia. How much would would it cost to maintain such servers? Seems fundable by a wealthy liberal.

I just left a building with 4.5 stars on Google that was an absolute horrific nightmare. Somehow they had gamed the system so that all the recent very negative reviews got mostly taken down or hidden. Do NOT trust Google reviews if you have any inkling the place is sketchy. (I did but the reviews and price were good)

Those are shit though, on average. Only the very upset respond. You're going to have to figure out a way to make the satisfied show up.

not a thing i've ever heard of in sweden, either apartments are just expensive or you need to sign up for a waiting list and maintain your spot for like 7 years until you have the queue points needed for the apartment you want to rent

Never heard about it in Norway

I'm a Swede living in Denmark. Not a thing in Scandinavia, apparently.

Never heard of it in Croatia.

It's basically the same process. The ideal tenant is someone that can't afford a mortgage by the slimmest of margins.

Room or studio apartment.

https://www.daft.ie/for-rent/studio-apartment-1-dublin-20-dublin-20/5704336

"Verifiable reference’s essential Verifiable affordability essential"

The passport, government id, and work reference are all to make sure you can "afford" to live there.

I agree with you by principle but there are those who have no interest in ever having a house of their own, either by personal or professional reasons.

Maintaining a house entails expenses, from current maintenance, to taxes and the eventual full overhaul because someone decided to trash the place.

I don't want to see people exploited to have a roof over their head and I'm a hairs width away from starting to actively trolling stupid people that think their busted places are gold plated to ask fortunes. But I don't want to see people be deprived of what is theirs and/or see it trashed by others that consider because they are there just for a limited time frame any concern for consequences is out the window.

Where are you writing from? Tenants have pretty strong protections where I live and an eviction is not a trivial matter here. And if people actually knew how to read, the law is pretty explicit on what is licit, both for tenants and owners (the word "landlord" sounds too much like feudalism to me to use it). Rent prices are high here but a poorly kept place can backfire so badly to the owners that they can see the rent not being paid in place of having work done on the house by the tenants.

So, grocery stores are morally wrong? I mean, food is a human right, isn't it? What about hotels?

Providing a necessary service in exchange for money isn't morally wrong.

Not everyone wants to own property. It's a huge financial liability, and a pain in the ass, tbh. I actually know people who sold their homes and moved into apartments because they were sick of the time and money required to upkeep a house.

While there are absolutely landlords who are immoral, especially corporate landlords, saying that being a landlord is inherently immoral is just incorrect.

You know, malls were initially envisioned as fully indoor planned communities. It didn't survive long, but it was a way better concept