RentPin
Nairobi rentals where the vacancy count is true today.
A caretaker-verified housing marketplace. Caretakers keep live vacancy counts for the buildings they look after, so a renter sees what is actually free today, books a viewing in a few taps, pays a small viewing fee, and shows a QR pass at the gate.
| Status | Pre-launch. Runs locally and is covered by tests; not yet deployed. |
|---|---|
| Role | Sole builder |
| Stack | FastAPI · Expo / React Native (renter and caretaker apps from one codebase) · Alembic · pytest |
| Host | Not deployed yet |
| Limit | No Firebase: alerts reach a closed app by SMS, with per-number cooldowns and a daily cap |
The shape of it
How it works
- Live counts: a caretaker taps a count up or down as homes are taken or freed. It works offline and syncs later.
- Trust is computed, not typed: a caretaker's status (active now, updated today, quiet for a while) comes from what they actually did.
- A viewing end to end: book, confirm, pay the viewing fee by M-Pesa prompt, get a QR pass, check in at the gate, pay out the caretaker's share.
- The fee reaches the caretaker only after check-in. Cancelling, or nobody checking in before the pass expires, refunds the renter in full.
- Address and phone number stay hidden until the caretaker confirms and the fee is settled. Renters and caretakers message without ever seeing each other's number.
- English and Kiswahili throughout, enforced by a test that fails when an English string has no Kiswahili one.
What is not claimed
- Pre-launch. Production settings, scheduled payouts, data-protection compliance and a deploy story are still on the list of known gaps.
- The Kiswahili is a first draft for a native speaker to check.