Why we're building Holp

Most letting software is written by people who have never been on the receiving end of it. Holp started from the other side of the table.

The renting years

Before any of this was a product, it was years of renting in Ireland. Applying for properties and hearing nothing back — not a rejection, just silence, for weeks, while you kept paying for a place you were trying to leave. Sending the same payslips and the same reference letter to the same agency three times because nobody could find the last copy. Turning up to a viewing with thirty other people and understanding that the decision would be made on whoever the agent happened to remember.

Then, once you were finally in: reporting a problem and watching it disappear. Not refused — disappeared. Into a WhatsApp thread, or an inbox, or a phone call someone meant to make. You'd follow up twice and feel like a nuisance for asking whether the heating was going to be fixed before winter.

The thing we got wrong at first

It would be easy to finish that story by blaming letting agents. That was the original assumption, and it was wrong.

Talk to the people doing the job and a different picture appears. One agent, forty enquiries per property, across a dozen landlords, with a spreadsheet, an inbox, and a phone that doesn't stop. Nobody ignored that application on purpose. It was in an email thread that got buried under sixty others the same afternoon. Nobody meant to lose the payslips. There was nowhere to put them.

The tenant experience isn't bad because agents don't care. It's bad because the hardest, most human part of the job — deciding who gets the keys — has no tools at all. Every other part of letting has software. That part runs on memory and goodwill, and memory and goodwill don't scale to forty applicants.

What that means for what we build

So Holp is built for the overwhelmed agent, not to police them. Give one person a way to see every applicant in one place, move them through real stages, and answer "who's best?" without scrolling back through two hundred emails, and the tenant experience fixes itself as a side effect. The applicant who would have been forgotten gets an answer, because forgetting them stopped being the path of least resistance.

That's the whole thesis. Make the agent's day survivable, and everyone downstream of them — the landlord waiting on a decision, the applicant waiting on a reply, the tenant waiting on a repair — stops being collateral damage.

Where we are

Being built now, in Ireland, for the Irish market. Euro pricing, Daft and MyHome listings, RTB-aware from day one.

If you let property for a living, we'd genuinely like to hear how you do it today — including the parts you'd rather not admit run on a spreadsheet.Join the waitlist, or just emailhello@holp.me.