Finding a room in Eindhoven is already difficult for Dutch students, but for international students, the challenge is even greater. Their search begins from their home country, meaning they often cannot attend a viewing or an open house. As a result, they largely have to rely on their instincts to avoid being scammed.

Silva wants to help with exactly that. He sees that the severe housing shortage makes students willing to take risks and overlook red flags. According to him, that isn’t necessary, because there are ways to determine whether you're dealing with a scammer.

Analysis

For example, you can check whether photos of the room appear elsewhere on the internet, watch for landlords who are in an unusual hurry to rent out the property or ask for an excessively high security deposit, and verify whether the rent is realistic for the neighborhood.

Silva’s website takes all of these factors and more into account, analyzes the listing, and assigns it a legitimacy score from 1 to 100. A low score indicates a high likelihood that you're dealing with a scammer.

Much of the analysis is available free of charge. Those who want additional certainty can pay for a comprehensive fraud and property report, which also includes a property ownership check through the Dutch Land Registry.

When Silva moved from Portugal to study at TU/e, he didn’t have any trouble finding a place to live. His grandparents still owned a house in Helmond where he was able to stay. He took over the management of the property and rented out the remaining rooms. It wasn’t until he posted an available room in a WhatsApp group run by a Portuguese organization that helps students study in the Netherlands that he realized just how severe the housing shortage really was.

“My WhatsApp kept going off with notifications all day long. Message after message, and everyone was asking the same question: ‘Is the room still available?’”

For Silva, the project is both an entrepreneurial adventure and an attempt to solve a concrete problem for international students. “I’ve always wanted to be an entrepreneur and create things,” he explains. The idea for Dormetrics came to him after attending an event hosted by startup accelerator Y Combinator in Paris.

“I spoke with several people there who had founded startups. They all basically said the same thing: solve big problems,” Silva says. “That made me think about the housing crisis in the Netherlands and friends who couldn’t come here because they couldn’t find a room.”

Concrete problem

He knew there was little he could do about the housing crisis itself: “I can’t suddenly create more space to build houses.” But by helping people make better-informed decisions, he hopes to solve at least one concrete problem that international students are facing.

Students are not exactly known for having a lot of money to spend. Still, Silva believes many of them will be willing to pay for the full report. Partly because parents are often the ones paying for student housing, and partly because the website provides peace of mind.

“It costs 29 euros to have a full check performed. That’s insignificant compared to the risk of losing hundreds of euros in rent or a security deposit to a scammer. I’m selling safety and the confidence that you’re making the right decision.”

Hyping up

This is not the first time Silva has developed a website like this. A previous project looks remarkably similar to Dormetrics, but serves a completely different purpose: ’hyping up’ people when they have to do something they don’t feel like doing. People searching for a room could probably use a bit of that as well, because even with Silva’s help, finding housing will likely remain a major challenge.

Dormetrics will launch around the 17th of July, there is a waiting list you can apply for until then.

This article was translated using AI-assisted tools and reviewed by an editor.