Questions about Housey, answered

A shared board for one house search. You save the listings you are looking at from wherever you find them, keep what you thought while you were standing in the house, and compare them later without trying to remember which house was which. Your realtor, your partner and anybody else you invite work on the same board.

Housey is free while it is in beta. There are no paid plans today. If that changes we will say so here first.

No. A board works on its own from the first save, and most people start one before they have chosen who to work with. Inviting a realtor later changes nothing about what is already on it.

Yes. Housey runs in your mobile browser on iOS and Android and there is nothing to download. Open the board link you were sent and everything works, which matters most on the one day you are standing in a hallway trying to remember what the last house cost.

With a Google account. It is the only sign-in method today, which keeps us from storing a password for you at all.

Install the Chrome extension, open a listing on a site it knows, and one click puts it on your board with its address, price, photographs and details already filled in. It works on 13 listing sites, including Realtor.ca, Zolo, Zoocasa, Condos.ca, Royal LePage, RE/MAX.

Add the house to the board yourself and fill in what you know. A card typed by hand behaves exactly like a saved one: it moves through the same lanes, takes the same notes and appears in the same comparisons.

The address, the asking price, the photographs, the basic facts such as bedrooms, bathrooms and parking, and a link back to where it came from.

Your card stays as it was. The details and photographs were saved to your board when you saved it, so the card survives the listing being removed, although the link back to the original will stop working.

Columns for where a house is in your search, starting at Considering and To View, and a card for each house. Open a card and you get its photographs, its facts, your notes and the documents attached to it.

Yes. A board is one search, so a separate one for a different city, a different budget or a different person is the normal way to use it, and each has its own members.

On the card, where you will find them again next to the photographs of the house you wrote them about. What you write is yours: the board distinguishes between a private note and something shared with everybody on it.

Put them side by side and read the facts and your own notes in the same columns. The point of comparing in Housey rather than in your head is that what you thought at the viewing is still attached to the house you thought it about.

Yes. Pick the houses you want to see, and Housey puts them in an order with the travel between them worked out, so a Saturday of viewings is one plan rather than six calendar entries.

Yes. Inspection reports, status certificates, floor plans and anything else worth keeping can be attached, so the paperwork for a house is on the house rather than in an email thread.

Send an invitation from the board. You choose what each person can do when you invite them, and you can change it afterwards.

The board you invited them to, and on it what has been shared rather than what you kept private. Your private notes stay yours. Nobody sees a board they were not invited to.

Yes. Anybody you invite signs in with Google to open the board, which is what keeps a forwarded link from becoming a way into your search.

Yes. A realtor account gets its own view across every board they have been invited to, so a working week is one screen rather than a folder per family.

Your data travels encrypted and is stored in Google Firebase. We do not sell it and we do not use it for advertising. What you keep private stays private, and you decide what the people on your board can see.

You do. The notes, the ratings, the documents and the houses on your board are yours, and Housey holds them on your behalf.

Email us and we do it. There is no self-serve delete button yet, which we would rather say plainly than imply otherwise: the request is handled by a person, and the privacy page sets out what is removed and what cannot be, such as a message somebody else already has.

No. Housey keeps what you saved from a public listing page and what you wrote yourself. It is not a feed from the MLS and it is not a source of truth about a property, so anything that matters should be confirmed with your realtor and the listing itself.

Email us and you reach the person who builds Housey. It is a small project, so replies are personal rather than instant.

That it is being worked on in the open. It is used for real house searches today, and things change from week to week. If something breaks, telling us is the fastest way to have it fixed.