I Built a Housing App in 4 Months as a Greek Expat in Amsterdam
Four months ago I was doing what tens of thousands of people in this city do every year: refreshing rental listings at midnight, paying for the privilege of sending messages into a void, and slowly losing my mind.
I'm Panagiotis. I'm Greek, I live in Amsterdam, and I had no makelaar network, no Dutch family to vouch for me, and no idea how rigged the search would feel until I was inside it. This is the honest story of why I started building Vond with my co-founder Savvas — and what four months of building it taught me.
The moment it clicked
There was one evening that did it. I'd paid a monthly subscription to a big platform purely to be allowed to message landlords. I sent a careful, polite message about an apartment. No reply. Sent another about a second place. No reply. Later I became fairly sure one of those listings wasn't even real.
I sat there and did the math on what I was actually paying for: not a home, not even a viewing — just access to a box that the people on the other side (agents, insiders, anyone with a network) got to skip. The whole thing was built for everyone except the person actually looking for somewhere to live.
That's the feeling I couldn't shake. Not "this is annoying," but "this is backwards."
What I learned digging into the rules
Before writing a line of code, I went deep on how renting here actually works — and found the thing that, honestly, made me angry enough to build:
Under the Wet goed verhuurderschap (the Good Landlord Act, in force since July 2023), if a rental agent works for the landlord, they cannot legally charge the tenant a mediation fee. And yet renters pay these fees constantly — bemiddelingskosten, "contract fees," "administration" — often without knowing they can refuse, or reclaim what they've already paid.
So the market wasn't just inefficient. In a lot of cases it was charging people for things they didn't owe, because the rules are confusing and nobody's incentivised to explain them. That became the spine of everything: be the platform that's actually on the renter's side.
The four lessons from building it
1. The hard part isn't the swipe UI — it's trust
Anyone can build a listings feed. The thing that's genuinely hard, and genuinely valuable, is making sure the landlord on the other end is real. That's why we put KvK verification at the centre: we check a landlord's registration with the Dutch Chamber of Commerce before their listings go live. It's not glamorous and it's not magic, but it moves the "is this a scam?" burden off the renter — which is the whole point.
2. Pick a fight you can actually win
We're two people. We can't out-spend incumbents and we won't try. What we can do is be radically clearer and fairer on the one thing they're structurally bad at: putting renters and landlords in direct contact with no fee and no paywall between them. Constraints made the product sharper, not weaker.
3. Ship the waitlist before the product
The most useful thing we did early was put up a real waitlist at vond.house and start talking to people before the product was finished. Every "what's the most frustrating part for you?" reply has changed what we're building. You learn more from 50 honest conversations than from 50 features.
4. Bootstrapping is a feature, not a bug
No outside money means we answer to renters, not to a growth target that eventually demands we put up a paywall. The business model is honest by design: free to find, never an agency fee. That alignment is the only reason I'd trust a platform like this myself.
Where we are now
Vond is pre-launch in Amsterdam. The waitlist is live and growing almost entirely by word of mouth — people who are just done with the current way of doing this, forwarding it to friends. No ad budget, on purpose. If it's good, it should spread because it's useful.
If you've ever sat where I sat that evening — paying to message a landlord who never replied — I'd genuinely love for you to be one of the first people through the door.
And if you're building something of your own as an expat here: it's hard, the bureaucracy is real, and it's worth it. Reach out — I read every message.
Panagiotis Pelardis is the co-founder of Vond, a direct, fee-free housing platform for Amsterdam. This post reflects personal experience; for legal specifics on rental fees, consult the Huurcommissie or a tenant-rights organisation like !WOON.