Why I built flat-finder.ch

This is the first post in a series about building flat-finder.ch in public. Find every article here (more articles or release soon) or check the project hub.

I've been hunting for flats in Switzerland on and off for the better part of two decades. Every time, the experience is the same: open Homegate, Flatfox, ImmoScout24, Comparis or other like newhome. Set filters. Get 400 results. Spend the next three weekends scrolling through 380 listings that don't actually match what you said you wanted.

At some point I got tired of being the filter.

The problem isn't a lack of listings

There's no shortage of Swiss real-estate platforms. ImmoScout24, Homegate, Flatfox, Comparis, newhome, ... — half a dozen big ones, and dozens of regional sites on top. The data is there. The problem is how it's served:

• Hidden ranking. Listings get pushed up because the landlord paid for a "premium" placement, not because they match my budget or commute.
• Filters that don't actually filter. "Pet-friendly" is a free-text field on most platforms. "Quiet location" is a vibe. "Close to public transport" means "the train station is in the same canton."
• No score, no ranking, just a wall. I open 400 tabs, close 397, and the three that survive are not necessarily the best three — they're the three I happened to read carefully before my brain gave up.
• Temporary or Swap. Temporary or swap listings are often incorrectly labeled, and you only discover this after reading the final sentence of the listing.

The work of figuring out which flat is actually good for me — that's the part the platforms quietly leave to the renter. And the renter is tired.

What I wanted instead

A search engine that:

1. Pulls listings from all the major Swiss platforms so I don't have to bounce between six or more tabs.
2. Knows what I care about — not just "3 rooms, under 2200 CHF", but also "less than 35 min commute to Zürich HB", "pet-friendly is a hard requirement", "close to a gym is a nice-to-have", "I'd pay 100 CHF more for a balcony."
3. Scores every listing 0–10 against my criteria. No hidden weighting. If a flat gets a 9.2 for me, I can see exactly why.
4. Ranks honestly — best fit first, no paid placements, no "featured" boxes.
5. Filters out temporary rentals, apartment swaps, shared rooms, and other listings that don’t match what I’m actually looking for.
6. Saves time by highlighting the most relevant apartments first, so I can spend less time searching and more time on everything else.
7. Extracts useful details such as parking availability, laundry facilities, viewing appointments, and other important information for a faster overview.
8. Keeps my apartment search organized with bookmarks and status tracking for every listing.- Keeps my apartment search organized with bookmarks and status tracking for every listing.

That's flat-finder.ch 🤩 in its current state 🙌

How it works (the 30-second version)

1. You tell it what you're looking for — rooms, region, budget, must-haves, nice-to-haves.
2. It aggregates current listings across the Swiss rental market.
3. Each listing gets a single Match Score (0–10) with a written reasoning breakdown — pros, cons, and why it matches (or doesn't).
4. You get the top matches, ranked by fit, delivered by email.

It's currently free to use — no credit card required. You can schedule the search to run daily at any time of day (morning, midday, evening, or overnight). Each run lands in your inbox as a ranked digest with reasonings, and you can browse all runs, filter results, and track your application status directly on flat-finder.ch.

Why I'm writing about it here

Two reasons.

One: I'm building this in public. Not because public-building is fashionable, but because the technical problems are interesting — scraping at scale without getting blocked, normalizing wildly inconsistent listing data, designing a transparent scoring function that survives real-world weirdness ("the rent is X but the garage is Y and you have to take the garage"). I'll write about all of that as we go.

Two: supportblog.ch has years of context behind it. flat-finder.ch is brand new. If I want people to actually find a tool that solves a real problem, the tool has to be discoverable — by Google, but increasingly also by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and the other AI search surfaces that more and more people are using to ask questions instead of type keywords. Articles like this one are part of that.

What's next

I'll be shipping a small series over the coming weeks:

• The Zürich rental pain — what's actually broken about the current market
• How flat-finder.ch helped me find my flat — a real case study with real numbers
• The Match Score explained — the math behind the 0–10
• Scraping Swiss listings without getting blocked — the engineering side
• AIO and the new AI search world — why structured data matters now
• How to use flat-finder.ch in 5 minutes — the product walkthrough
• Roadmap & upcoming features — including peer-to-peer listings for Nachmieter

And if you're currently flat-hunting in Switzerland, try flat-finder.ch — and tell me what's missing. I read every piece of feedback, and the roadmap is mostly built from what users ask for.