2017: A Year in Review

Hi there 👋

Retrospectives are an essential part of our sprints and way of working at Qasa. As the year comes to an end, it seems appropriate to look back over the past twelve months to get the big picture and reflect on what has happened. Indeed 2017 was an eventful year at Qasa! 

The Highlights

• We've doubled our user base
• 29% increase of published listings*
• 73% increase of registered sublets*
• We mediated 49 first hand leases**

*Compared to 2016, **Newly produced apartments owned by K2A Properties in Haninge, Stockholm

These numbers indicate that our devotion towards building a better product for our users is paying off. With that in mind I'd like to present a brief summary of what we have built and released since January 1st 2017.

Starting in January we released a new sign-up flow for home seekers. The on-boarding now follows a simple step by step guide that lets you describe your needs, preferences and budget. The answers are composed into a rental profile and can be updated at any time. Your rental profile automatically subscribes to new listings that fit your rental profile and you'll be notified through email and SMS. If that's too much you can always change your notification settings.

In February we released a new sign-up flow for landlords as well. Following the same principle as the home seeker sign-up we wanted to make it simple and clutter-free to list your home on Qasa.

In March we launched a brand new page for all our tenants and landlords - the rental payments page. Here you get an overview of your last paid and upcoming invoices or payouts. We also released two different payout plans that lets the landlord choose whether the fee to Qasa should be withdrawn monthly or from the first months rent. You can read more about the payout plans here.

Then came April and we released the first version of our new matching algorithm! It's a smart search engine built to find the best matches among our home seekers and landlords. Being one of the core features of our platform and we continuously monitor and evaluate its performance to make it even better. 

June had a few releases as well, the most impactful being our Reference Check Service. The Reference check is priced at 249 SEK. For the money, Qasa will contact your references and append a reference verification document to your profile. Home seekers can upload contact details for up to three references (either previous landlords or managers from work) that we contact and ask a few questions. The reference verification is a downloadable PDF that also can be sent to third parties.

In July we launched our collaboration with K2A Properties to mediate first hand leases to newly built rental housing all across Sweden.

In August and September we focused on improving the stability and performance of our platform.

October came and we published 48 apartments for K2A Properties in Haninge, Stockholm. This was a huge step for us as we now began our journey to bridge the gap between first hand leases and subleases in Sweden, and making first hand rental leases more accessible. On the product it meant we need to be able to collect more information about our users. Of course we make sure the information is stored privately and safe.  

In November we signed 48 first hand leases to new tenants for K2A Properties. During the two weeks the apartments were listed we received more than 1500 applications!

In December we focused on improving our algorithm and the usability. Our users always come first, and our goal is always to make private housing rentals safer, smarter and more fun! All of the feedback we receive goes into our backlog and bi-weekly sprint plannings.

Thank you for all the feedback we've received in 2017. Keep it coming!

So, what does the crystal ball tell about 2018?

We're starting of strong with more first hand leases being published in January. We have a new collaboration with ByggVesta and will publish 8 student apartments in Stockholm very soon. Move in date is early March.

We'll also continue our collaboration with K2A Properties and publish 44 new apartments in Örebro with move in from early February.

On the product side we will continue to improve the algorithm, listen to our users and make housing rentals safer, easier and more fun!

We also have some really exciting stuff that we can't talk about yet, but rest assure that there's a lot to look forward to in 2018.

We really hope you'll keep following us and find great value in our service!

Don't hesitate to contact us if there something you want to tell us: it can be something you really like about our service, don't like at all or just don't understand. Either way we're curious to hear about it.

Towards a great 2018!

Victor and the team at Qasa