Roost is an iOS app for finding a London rental.
We designed it and built it ourselves. Roost watches London's estate agents in real time, understands every home it finds, and tells you about the ones worth your Saturday.
Download on theApp StoreLive on the App Store, and on your phone in a minute.
- Platform
- Native iOS app, iPhone, iOS 17 and later
- Availability
- The UK App Store
- Live since
- 29 July 2026
- Current release
- Version 1.4.0
- Free to start
- 30 homes a week
- Price
- £2.99 a week
- Coverage
- London
Roost is a finished product that people are using today, and the next release is already in build.
Download on theApp Store- Your feed
- What matches
- Pinned places
- Budget
- Areas
- Preferences
What Roost does, screen by screen.
One screen to decide.
Each home shows what it costs, where it is, and why it matches you.
Scroll down and Roost lists what matches your search, and what doesn't.
Double-tap a photo to save a home. Contact opens the agent's own listing and moves the home to Contacted in your Tracker.
Tell us what you'd like in a home and we'll rank the rest lower, not out of sight.
An alert, with the home in it.
When a new home matches, Roost sends a notification with the price, the area and why it fits.
The alert carries a photo of the home, so you know before you open it.
You choose whether to have them on the last step of setup. A viewing reminder from your Tracker comes the same way.
A companion for every home you save.
Your Tracker looks after every home you save: record a viewing, add it to your calendar, set a reminder, keep your questions in one place, and say how it went.
Every home has a stage: Saved, Contacted, Viewing arranged, Applied.
Notes and questions are shared with the person you search with. Sharing a home invites your partner or flatmate into Roost first.
Recording a viewing in Roost does not book one. You arrange it with the agent; Roost keeps the details.
Your budget, against the market.
Insights shows you how your budget fits into London's market, and lets you tweak it to give you the best chance.
Budget: drag the handle and the figures follow, for the size of home you want.
Areas: compare your areas for the same-sized home, cheapest first, with your budget drawn across them.
The figures are shares of the homes Roost has seen, not what is available today.
The places you go, on every home.
Pin the places that matter to you, like work or family, and every home shows the door-to-door journey to each one.
The journeys count towards your match.
Pin a place from any home's map. The journeys appear in place, without a reload.
Four short steps.
Setting up is four short steps, with real London homes in the photographs.
Choose the neighbourhoods you'd happily live in. Pick a borough and its neighbourhoods appear underneath.
Pick what matters to you in a home. A home without it ranks lower, not out of sight.
A radar, pointed at your search.
The whole platform, in four steps and one loop.
You set your terms
Your budget, the neighbourhoods you would actually live in, the things you will not give up, and how far you will walk to a station.
We watch London in real time
Roost monitors estate agents across the city continuously, all day and all night, and picks up a new home within minutes of it going live.
Every home is understood
Roost reads the listing and looks at every photograph, then turns both into structured facts about the home. This is the part everything else rests on.
You hear while it matters
Each home is scored against your terms, with its reasons written down, and a strong match reaches your phone while the flat is still available.
And then it goes round again. Everything you save and pass on feeds back into the scoring, so the longer you search, the better the top of your feed fits you.
London, watched continuously.
Roost keeps a continuous watch on estate agents across London. New homes are picked up within minutes of going live, and homes already found are revisited so a price cut is noticed and a flat that has gone stops being offered to you as though it were still available.
This matters more in London than almost anywhere. A quarter of the homes Roost has tracked had left the market by day 13 from first appearing, and half by day 31, so what you see depends entirely on when you happen to look.
Roost reads the listing, and looks at the photographs.
An agent's listing is written to sell, so the useful detail is buried, missing or contradicted by the pictures. Roost reads the description and examines every photograph, then turns the pair into structured facts about the home. That is what makes a feed sortable by how well a place actually suits you, and it is the part of Roost we own outright.
It also notices what a listing would prefer you missed. A wide lens making small rooms look generous, photographs that never show the kitchen, a whole flat advertised as a room.
What Roost knows after reading one home
Every home in your feed carries a filled-in record like this one, built from the listing and its photographs before you ever see it. The fields are the real ones. The values below are an illustration, not a live listing.
From the photographs
- Condition
- Newly refurbished
- Natural light
- Excellent
- Property era
- Period
- Room sizes
- Average
- Decor style
- Modern
- Outdoor space
- Yes
- Bath
- Yes
From the listing
- Features
- Balcony, dishwasher, underfloor heating, bike storage
- Nearest station
- London Fields, 6 minutes on foot
- Floor
- Second, no lift
- Available from
- 12 September
- Whole property
- Yes
Flagged for you
- Rooms look tiny
- The photography uses a wide lens throughout
- Short let only
- Not detected
Roost runs on Google Cloud.
The service behind the app, the database, the photography and the jobs that keep the whole thing moving all run on Google Cloud, in its London region. It is built to scale from one city to many without being taken apart first.
Where Roost goes from here.
Four things we are building towards, in the order we mean to build them. No dates attached, because the only deadline worth keeping is getting them right.
A feed that learns you
Roost already knows a great deal about London homes, and it learns something about your taste every time you swipe. Putting those together properly is the next real step, so the flats at the top of your feed in a month fit you better than the ones there today.
Roost on Android
Roost is an iPhone app today, which quietly excludes about half the people looking for somewhere to live. An Android version is coming, and the people waiting for it have been patient.
Beyond London
We started in London because London is where the scramble is worst. The same watching and understanding works anywhere people compete for homes, so the rest of the country follows.
For when you want to buy
Plenty of people renting in London are trying to stop. Buying a first home has all the same problems, only slower, with more paperwork and far more at stake. We want Roost to be useful for that search too.