Martina G.

Read what went wrong, and why I will never again use HomeSuite:

I was looking for an apartment in LA to spend 3 months with my husband and our 10 month old baby. I reserved one via HomeSuite.

Due to the lack of an integrated booking system shared between HomeSuite and the landlords, we ended up being double-booked, meaning that we were promised an apartment which turned out to be unavailable one week before we were due to move in (flying directly from Europe).

We were offered another apartment, and we accepted due to the time pressure brought by the high-season. The unit turned out to be awful: full of mould, run down and not fully-equipped. There was nothing to cook with, chairs, dishwasher, electric outlets fell apart, windows were stuck and had not been opened in ages. The place was dirty, with a few cockroaches here and there.

We asked to be relocated as we did not want to stay there, especially with a baby.

What was HomeSuite's response?

First they avoided us. We had to call over and over to talk with clueless members of the customer service team, some of them extremely rude and unprofessional, never reaching management. I sent a lengthy email to the CEO David Adams, cc'ing all the sales managers I had been dealing with during the booking process, and was ignored by all of them. I managed to talk to the Customer Success Manager who initially refused to tell me her name and her position and who giggled on the phone but no one took action. It was only after I threatened to defame them that I received a call from the Customer Team Manager offering to send us an air purifier.

That's when I came to realise the crucial issue with HomeSuite, which lays within the business model itself.

As stated on the lease, HomeSuite does not take responsibility for how the flat actually looks like (that's the landlord's responsibility). They simply "interview" landlords, facilitate the paperwork and get a commision. In this sense, they don't offer any guarantees as they seem to be claiming on their website. They are in no position for taking responsibility for their customers on any reasonable level. Neither do they provide a hassle-free process, since they double-book properties, and they do not have full information of the property details. For instance, before booking, I asked whether there was a washing machine in the unit. They had to call the landlord to investigate whilst I waited for a day. I then asked about the dishwasher and again, I had to wait for another day.

That is very contradictory, considering that HomeSuite's main promise is that of providing high-quality housing.

The reality is that they are actually incapable of doing so, precisely because there are no verified standards. In fact, they are so unsure of what they are selling that they actually protect themselves by preemptively dismissing all responsibilities in the contract, despite misleadingly suggesting the contrary when they market their services.

The main problem with HomeSuite and the reason why, I believe (and I hope), the company is doomed to fail, is that it doesn't have a two-way rating system. Though they pretend to talk the "tech language", they lack the fundamental value that a service like Airbnb provides, which is trustworthiness. On Airbnb, guests review properties and hosts, and hosts review their guests, so if you don't deliver upon promise, you basically exclude yourself from the community by ruining your reputation.

HomeSuite takes the chance of advertising properties of which they are not 100% sure. And if something goes wrong, they are in no position of providing proper assistance to their customers due to the kind of deals they sign with the landlords (and to their staff, which is unprepared and does't take customers' happiness seriously, not matter how nicely they will try to respond to this post).

The reason why I will never again book an apartment with HomeSuite is not just because it went wrong this time, but because their whole strategy is set up in a way that forces the guest to take all the risks. The landlord is protected by the deposit and by the lease, just like HomeSuite is protected by dismissing all responsibilities when it comes to "how the flat is in reality".

The guest, instead, is caught in between and is either lucky, or unlucky.

We were unlucky.