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Rent hikes got you spiraling into StreetEasy doom scrolls at 2am? Same. That’s exactly what pushed software dev Adam Sebti and his friend Ilias Miraoui to build RentReboot.com—a brand-new, totally free tool that notifies you the moment a rent-stabilized apartment goes live on StreetEasy.
The duo, deep in the New York City rental trenches, was fed up with sky-high increases and the nearly impossible task of finding reasonably priced housing. So, like any good New Yorker armed with tech skills and a sense of rage, they decided to build a solution.
“We got the idea for this because we got frustrated with our rents increasing so much every year and wanted to find rent-stabilized apartments, but really struggled to do so,” Sebti, 30, says to Time Out. “We both have backgrounds in tech—Ilias as a founder and I as a freelance software developer—so we decided to use our skills to build this tool.”
RentReboot cross-references active StreetEasy listings with the city’s publicly available list of rent-stabilized buildings (yep, the one that’s more than 600 pages long) and pings you when a match shows up. It’s not perfect—just because a building can have rent-stabilized units doesn’t mean a given apartment is—but Sebti notes that you can check a rental’s price history to make an educated guess. It's clearly more helpful than endlessly scrolling through the Internet.
Currently focused on StreetEasy listings in Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens, the team plans to expand to crawl other listing sites and eventually include additional alert types, such as no-fee finds or below-market deals. No bots, no gimmicks—just a couple of renters who got fed up and decided to share their fix. And yes, the tool is completely free to use.
So if your rent just jumped a cool 8% and your landlord gifted you nothing but a smirk, RentReboot might soon be your new favorite tab.