Four steps, and none of them is a phone call to a dead listing.
You know the week. Twenty listings, eighteen numbers, four people who say the flat went last month and two who ask which broker you are. Everything below is what FoundNow does instead — with the hours, thresholds and weights it actually runs on, so you can hold us to them.
No number on this page was chosen for how it sounds. The three below are measured and hide themselves when we cannot measure them; every threshold further down is a constant in the code.
Published, available, and confirmed by the owner in the last seven days.
Across every conversation started in the last seven days. Not a badge anyone awarded themselves.
Share of the last seven days' searches that came back with at least five places.
Type it the way you'd say it. Go and see it.
No download, no account to look. Searching, opening a listing and reading its comments need nothing from you; you sign in when you want to message, save or book a visit — and that is a one-time code to a phone or an email, not a password to invent.
- 01
Say it in your own sentence
English or Hinglish. The app shows you what it understood as pills you can correct, rather than silently guessing. - 02
Search from where you actually are
Your location, a locality you type, or a place you saved as home or office. Distance is measured from that point, not from the city centre. - 03
Compare a real monthly figure
Every card carries rent plus the recurring charges the owner has disclosed, and a move-in figure that includes the deposit. Charges left blank are counted separately and shown as undisclosed. - 04
Book the visit in the app
Against slots the owner offers, with an hour’s notice at minimum. Both of you get a reminder an hour before.
A listing here has to keep proving it is real.
This is the part other portals do not have, and the reason a search here is short. A listing is not a permanent advertisement — it is a claim with an expiry date on it, and the owner has to keep renewing that claim by hand.
- Day 0
Published, with a window on it
Seven days, fifteen or thirty — three windows, not a free number of days. A field would invite 90 and 365, and a year is indistinguishable from never.7 / 15 / 30days, owner picks1+photo required - Every Monday, 09:00 IST
“Still available?”
One notification, one screen, one tap per listing. An owner with four rooms confirms all four in a single request. It arrives an hour after the owner’s weekly numbers on purpose — read the report first, then the ask; reversed, the ask is what gets ignored. - Day 7, 03:00 IST
The sweep runs and the quiet ones drop out
Anything not confirmed inside the window is marked unconfirmed and stops showing in nearby search — and scores zero on availability, which is the heaviest signal there is. The owner is told, in the same sweep, that it happened and that one tap fixes it. It used to happen silently, which reads like the platform losing your listing rather than something you can undo.7 daysbefore it goes stale03:00nightly, IST - Second miss
The listing pauses itself
Two consecutive misses and it comes down entirely. Better to show a seeker nothing than to send them across town to a flat that went last month.2missed confirmations - 3 days before the end
A warning with a date in it
At 10:00 IST, mid-morning rather than dawn, because this asks the owner to do something and a notification that lands while somebody is asleep gets cleared off the lock screen unread. It names the calendar day — “18 Aug” — not “in 3 days”, which is already wrong by the time the email is opened. - End of the window, 04:00 IST
It pauses. Nothing is deleted.
The listing, its photos, its messages and its history all survive. Putting it back is one tap, on a fresh window — an owner whose room is still free should not have to type it in again because they were away for a week.
Availability is the product.
Eight signals decide the order, and none of them is money.
Every portal you have used ranks by who paid. That is why the first four results are always the same four, and why none of them is near you. Here is the whole formula instead.
- 01
It starts from a point you chose
Your current location, a locality you typed, or a place you saved. Not a city centre, and not a postcode standing in for one. - 02
It asks for everything inside the radius
Five kilometres unless you say otherwise, twenty-five at the absolute most — past that the product is no longer “near you” and should stop pretending. - 03
It scores what came back, then orders it
The eight signals on the right, summed to a match score out of 100. - 04
If nothing came back, it widens once — and says so
The radius doubles, capped at 25 km, and the results carry a line telling you the search was widened and from what. An empty page with no explanation is the worst answer a search can give. - 05
The category counts are counted at the radius you got
So a widened search reports the chips you are now looking at, not the empty ones you started with. A count that does not match what tapping it delivers is worse than no count.
Confirmed today scores full marks and decays straight to zero over seven days. Rented or unconfirmed scores nothing at all. "Available soon" is capped at 0.7 — a real option, but not what somebody who needs a place this week is looking at.
Decays quadratically, so 500 m against 1 km matters far more than 8 km against 9 km — which is how a commute actually feels.
Inside your ceiling scores full. Ten per cent over is still worth showing you; forty per cent over is not.
Measured from real conversations — the clock starts when you message and stops on the owner’s first reply. Fifteen minutes is close to full marks; a day is close to nothing.
Level 0 to level 4, divided by four. A tiebreak, never a cut.
The owner’s completeness score, out of 100. Disclosed charges and answered house rules weigh as much in it as photographs.
A fortnight of gentle preference for new supply, then nothing.
Ignored until a listing has been seen twenty times, so a brand-new room is not punished for being new.
Weights sum to 1.00. The bars are scaled to the largest so the chart is readable; the number beside each is the real one.
There is no paid-placement term and there must never be one.
It is worth something because there is nothing behind it to sell. No boost, no featured slot, no promoted row, no billing of any kind exists in this product — not switched off, not built. There is no lever an owner could pay to pull, which is a stronger guarantee than a promise not to pull one.
What it costs — the whole answer, in one page.
Type the sentence you would say out loud.
Not a form with eleven dropdowns. A search box that reads the way people in Udaipur actually write — and then shows you what it took from your words, so you can correct it rather than wonder.
2bhk hiran magri 15k tak
"15k tak" is a ceiling. "Hiran Magri" is not a filter — it is left as your own words and searched as text.
Four worked examples, read off the parser's own rules. The seeker app draws these pills under the search field on every query.
- Categories
- dukan and dukaan are a shop. godam is a warehouse. kamra is a room, makaan a house, zameen a plot. Thirty-nine categories, and the ones people type in Hinglish are in the rules alongside their English names.
- Money
- 15k, 15,000, ₹15000, 15 hazaar, 1.2 lakh. “tak” and “under” are a ceiling; “se upar” and “above” are a floor; two numbers with “between” are a range.
- Distance
- “within 2 km”, “2km ke andar”, “800 m”. paidal or walking distance is read as 1 km; nearby or paas mein as 2 km.
- Rooms
- 2bhk, 2 bhk, 2-bhk, 1 rk. There is no word boundary between the digit and the letters in the way people write it, and the rules account for that.
- Furnishing
- furnished, semi furnished, unfurnished — and khali for empty, saamaan for furnished.
- Everything else
- Left alone and searched as your own words. Unrecognised text is ignored, never guessed at.
A listing earns its place before anyone sees it.
Seven steps to publish: what kind of place, which building and unit, what it is like, what it costs, when someone can move in, the photos, and a last look. Two things are refusals rather than suggestions.
At least one photo
A pinned location
The completeness score, out of 100
Shown to the owner, entirely under their control, and worth 0.07 of the match score. It does not score how nice a property is. It scores how well the listing answers the questions somebody has to resolve before they will travel across Udaipur to look at it — which is why what a place costs and what its rules are weigh as much as its photographs.
A beautiful listing that hides its maintenance charge and will not say whether pets are allowed still wastes everybody’s Saturday.
- Photos
- 28
- Up to eight photos count, and up to five distinct kinds count again — the bathroom nobody photographs. Eight pictures of the same living room is not eight pictures’ worth of an answer.
- What it costs
- 18
- The deposit, and each of the six recurring charges answered either way. The single biggest source of move-in day arguments.
- The property itself
- 16
- Carpet area, furnishing, and up to seven amenities.
- Verification
- 13
- The rung the listing is on, times 3.25.
- House rules
- 10
- Seven rules — pets, smoking, couples, children, working from home, visitors, non-vegetarian food. Cheap to answer, and each one prevents a wasted Saturday.
- The description
- 8
- Sixty characters is worth half. Two hundred is worth all of it.
- What it is like to live in
- 4
- Light, noise and which way it faces.
- Why this place
- 3
- Up to three highlights in the owner’s own words.
Five rungs, and a listing shows which one it is on.
Cumulative — level 3 implies everything below it. Worth 0.09 of the match score as a tiebreak, never as a cut, though you can filter by it yourself if you want to.
- Phone verified
- 0
- A number that received a code and answered it.
- Identity verified
- 1
- The owner, not just the number they signed up with.
- Property verified
- 2
- Granted automatically at publish, because publishing already means a pinned location and at least one photo of the place.
- Documents verified
- 3
- Ownership papers, read by a person at FoundNow.
- Inspected by us
- 4
- Somebody from FoundNow stood in it.
You hear the day it changes, not the day you check back.
Saving a place on most portals is a bookmark. Here it is a subscription to that room's news — and the room that has not appeared yet is covered too.
It went
The rent dropped
Something opened near it
And then the visit
Booked in the app against slots the owner is offering, weighted towards the evening because that is when a working tenant can actually see a place. Anything already booked disappears from the list. Same-day slots need an hour’s notice at minimum — that is the least that is fair to somebody who has to be there to open the door.
An hour before, both of you are reminded. The job that sends it runs every ten minutes rather than hourly, because a 5:30 visit reminded by an hourly job gets told at 4:31 — a reminder for a different hour of somebody’s day.
- Slots offered
- 6
- 10:00, 12:00, 14:30, 16:00, 17:30 and 19:00, minus whatever is already taken.
- Minimum notice
- 1 hr
- On same-day slots. Tomorrow’s are open all day.
- Reminder
- 1 hr
- To the seeker and to the owner. Both of you arranged to be somewhere.
Four things this product cannot do, and one of them was deleted this week.
Not policies. Absences — either there is no code to do the thing, or the code that used to do it has been taken out.
- No paid placement. Not one of the eight ranking signals is money, and there is no promoted slot, boost or featured row anywhere in the product to sell you one.
- No number swap. Contact exchange was removed from FoundNow — the endpoint was deleted, not hidden behind a missing button. You talk inside the app. Threads from before it went keep whatever they had already exchanged.
- No background location. We ask when you search, and never otherwise. The Android build blocks the background-location permission outright, so the app could not do it if it wanted to.
- Nothing buzzes your phone between 21:00 and 08:00 IST — a reply, a visit, a new room near your office, any of it. The in-app row and the email still arrive; only the interruption is dropped. The single exception is a security alert on your own account, which is exactly the case where the hour is the point.
What stays private — the offset pin, the address that is never published, and what an owner can see about you.
The honest next step is to use it.
Searching needs no account and no download. It runs in the browser you are already in, and it will only ever show you places somebody confirmed were free this week.
Udaipur, Rajasthan. One city, done properly.