First Email Wins: Can RentReaper beat the St Andrews housing market?

In St Andrews, the housing market does not wait. By October, first-years are already panicking about leases for the following academic year. In a town where flats disappear in minutes, one student built a system designed to beat letting agents at their own game. Nicholas Dunn, a first-year mathematics and philosophy student, recently created RentReaper, an intelligent automation service designed to send flat enquiries instantly. 

Students compete intensely for limited housing while agencies control access to information, timing, and viewings. “I really don’t like the way that realtors and letting agents have power over us here,” said Dunn. He saw RentReaper as a response to that imbalance: by using AI to automate enquiries, students are able to take back some control in the housing market without spending all their free time refreshing rental websites. “We’re paying,” Dunn added. “We’re the clients. We should be the ones [who] are provided with the service.” 

His frustration is widely felt: students in St Andrews routinely describe the housing search as stressful and difficult, with some securing accommodation only in late summer or moving to Dundee instead. 

So one afternoon, Dunn sat down and broke the housing search into its simplest parts. “What do you actually need to find a house? Well, you need to find the listing, email the realtor for a viewing, and then follow up with the realtor for that viewing.” But usually, he said, “The letting agent uploads a listing, and by the time you have left your lecture to check, it is gone.” In a market where, as Dunn puts it, “the fastest email usually wins,” he decided to automate the race entirely.

That thought became RentReaper: a rental-monitoring service Dunn built specifically for students searching for accommodation in St Andrews, which he hopes will give them more control in a market where they often feel powerless.

Launched in March, the service costs £7 a month and scans major property listing sites such as Rightmove, Zoopla, OnTheMarket, and individual letting agent websites. Users can filter listings by price, bedrooms, furnishing, and distance from the town centre. When a listing matches a user’s filters, RentReaper alerts them and can automatically email the letting agent from the user’s own email address to request a viewing. 

Once students sign up, “there is very little left for them to do” besides checking their inboxes and cancelling the service once their housing search is over.

The original version, built for his own personal use, monitored property websites, detected listings as soon as they appeared, and sent pre-written application emails directly from his personal account to letting agents.

Dunn started working on a public version of the service after his mother pointed out that other students might pay for the same tool as their housing searches became more and more desperate. For Dunn, the decision to share the service was straightforward: “It’s just something that’s useful to me, and I wanted to share it with people. Everybody should get a chance.”

Dunn spent a few days adapting the system for public use, making it more secure and more flexible for other students’ requirements rather than just his own. The result was a version of RentReaper that students can customise around their own housing search.

When signing up, users can choose whether they only want to receive alerts or want RentReaper to contact letting agents automatically. Those who choose the automatic option create a reusable template with their details, housemates, documents, and viewing preferences. RentReaper then varies the wording of each email while keeping the intent. 

The email is not sent from a generic RentReaper account but comes from the user’s own Gmail address through an app password — meaning users do not have to share their main Gmail password and can revoke access separately. Because the emails come directly from users’ inboxes, Dunn says that it’s almost impossible for agencies to distinguish them from manually written applications. 

Since launching, RentReaper has attracted users in the “low hundreds,” according to Dunn, adding that several of his friends had already secured properties through the service, and other users had contacted him saying it helped them find accommodation. 

The scale of the service is still relatively small, but the difference is already clear. In one recent week, Dunn said around 80 properties were listed in St Andrews, and RentReaper alerted users to every single one. On average, he said, RentReaper’s alerts reached users around twelve minutes faster than the platforms’ own notifications. “In this market, those ten minutes make a very big difference,” he said.

But could a paywalled service like RentReaper make the St Andrews housing market even more unequal?

Dunn thinks that, if widely adopted, the platform would distribute opportunities more fairly than the current first-come, first-served system, and students attending lectures would have the same opportunities as those skipping them to view a flat.

RentReaper was not designed just for speed, but for fairness, Dunn said. "It is faster," he stated, "but if everyone were to start using it tomorrow, it would be a fairer system than what we have right now. It was built with [that] intention."

To avoid giving all viewing opportunities to the same user repeatedly, the platform uses a priority queue that weighs factors such as loyalty to the platform, referrals, and the number of opportunities a user already had to decide in which order notifications are sent. “I don’t want the first person that has signed up to get all 300 property viewings,” Dunn said.

“Not to over-intellectualise, but in general I believe in a free and open market,” he explained. “That is what motivated me to offer this tool: to open the market, not control it.”

Dunn added, “The more students use it, the more we’re uniting ourselves.” 

Distribution, said Dunn, has been the real challenge. The service has gained attention through Instagram accounts such as Overheardrews and Crushdrews, and through word of mouth. However, Dunn believes many students have heard the name without completely understanding what the service does. "Trying to get people to really understand that we're on their side" is the main challenge Dunn sees ahead.

Dunn plans to keep developing the platform. Next year, he wants to add more accurate location tools, allowing students to filter by street. He also wants users to be able to choose preferred letting agents or avoid particular ones. Eventually, he hopes to scan more sources, including Instagram and Facebook posts, so users would see a fuller picture of the St Andrews rental market.

For Dunn, RentReaper’s significance is not only that it helps students respond faster to letting advertisements, but that it exposes how much the current system depends on speed. If agencies eventually have to rethink how they handle viewing requests, Dunn hopes that change would make the process less frantic and more equal. Rather than seeing disruption as the end goal, Dunn frames it as a possible route toward something “more fair.”

Whether RentReaper can genuinely alter the balance of power in St Andrews’ housing market remains uncertain. Dunn himself is cautious about making grand claims. Landlords, he notes, still operate within an environment of constant demand and limited supply. 

But if the service can make students feel more powerful in the process, Dunn believes that matters: “I think it could really help students.”

Illustration by Louisa Nguyen