AI is Changing the Way Students Find Houses

It's no surprise that more and more students are turning to AI to simplify searching for housing: it’s a stressful problem and sometimes it feels like you just need all the help you can get. 40 people each week are reaching Student House Finder directly from ChatGPT, and other sites will be seeing the same. Perhaps housing is just another thing that AI is making easier?

On the surface, it sounds brilliant. You type in what you're looking for: maybe a two-bedroom flat near campus for under £195 a week. And within a few seconds, the AI spits out some suggestions. Quick, easy, and you don't have to wade through dozens of dodgy-looking websites. But here's the thing: it's not quite as helpful as it sounds.

The Problem With AI

Most AI tools like ChatGPT, Copilot and Gemini aren't actually connected to live property databases. They're trained on information from the internet, which means they can give you general advice or tell you about some of the letting agents that are popular with students. But when it comes to finding actual houses that are available right now? They're pretty much useless. In our testing, only half the houses found by ChatGPT were still on the market, and it didn’t search any of the student-specific letting agents.

These chatbots simply don’t have access to all the current listings, so they can’t search them all at once. They might suggest a few websites to check out and get hold of a couple of current listings for you, but that's about as far as it goes. You end up doing all the hard work yourself anyway, which defeats the point of using AI in the first place.

There's also the issue of outdated and incorrect information. Generally AI tools can’t tell if a property has been updated since it last saw it, and they can be easily convinced by a landlord describing a property as more appealing than it actually is. You could waste time chasing leads that don't exist anymore, which is incredibly frustrating when you're up against tight deadlines.

Enter Student House Finder AI

This is where Student House Finder's AI assistant comes in. We built it specifically for York students looking for housing, and connected it to our database of available properties, over 1,000 each year. When you ask it a question, it searches through actual listings that are updated every 2 hours, rather than guessing from outdated information from across the web. Plus, it’s much more efficient with how it processes information, giving it a much smaller environmental footprint than the average ChatGPT conversation.

To put it simply: asking a ChatGPT about student housing is a bit like asking someone who's just moved to York where to find a good meal. They might point you towards a chain or somewhere with decent reviews, but they won't know the spots that students actually like. Student House Finder AI has been built with knowledge of what's actually available and what students tend to look for.

We designed it to understand the things that matter when you're house-hunting: how far it is from campus, whether bills are included, what the bathroom situation is. It can work through hundreds of options quickly and show you the ones that genuinely match what you need.

So whilst AI is definitely changing how students search for housing, using the right tool can save you hours of frustration. If you want something that's genuinely useful rather than just another thing to add to your to-do list, give Student House Finder’s AI a go. It might just make your house hunt a whole lot easier.