My latest batch of “homecooked software” (along with interface0 and Vibesend):

Costeading — an app for saving, tagging, and discussing Zillow listings with friends and family.

My wife and I, like many couples, love looking at real estate. It’s fun.

Until about a year ago, Zillow had a mediocre feature for “shared saves.” You could make it so that your partner or friends got notified when you saved a Zillow listing. We used this. It had no way to comment or categorize or interact further, but at least you got a notification.

Then, they got rid of even this feature, to “make room for a new social experience.” Nine months later, there is no new experience. So I built one.

Costeading let you:

  • browse the Zillow app or site
  • hit “share” on any listing and share it to a group in Costeading
  • your groupmates all get a notification
  • you can then all tag the listing and comment on it

It even passes some information to an LLM to generate a custom name for the listing instead of just a street address.

(Who knew there were $300MM listings on Zillow??)

And as a bonus, it has a much better photo gallery viewer than Zillow, and pulls in the important information and organizes it cleanly in the detail pages.

Shopping for (or even just ogling) real estate is usually a social experience with your family or friends.

And so it feels like such low-hanging fruit for Zillow and others to have a light social and organizational layer — even just groups, comments, tags like Costeading.

But in the meantime, this home-cooked software will do.

Email me if you want a TestFlight link to try it out :)

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