I never planned to build a rental platform. But after years of chaotic student housing, followed by becoming an accidental landlord myself, I couldn’t unsee what was broken.
August started with a spreadsheet, a mountain of WhatsApp messages, and the realization that in 2024, we were still managing one of life’s biggest financial commitments like it was 1994.
The Problem I Lived
My rental journey began typically: as a student in a five-person house share. Every month was the same chaos. One flatmate paid on time, another was waiting for their student loan, someone paid half with promises of “the rest next week,” and two hadn’t paid at all. I became the accidental rent collector, mediating between mates and a landlord I barely knew.
Then the boiler broke. Days of back-and-forth messages. Requests for photos. Promises of “getting someone out.” A week later, someone showed up, but no one documented what was fixed or when they’d return to finish.
And finding documents? Good luck digging through eighteen-month-old email threads.
Here’s what struck me: **everyone was frustrated**. Tenants, landlords, everyone. Yet this was just “how things worked.”
The Other Side
After university, I became a small landlord myself—one property, student tenants. I thought it would be straightforward. I’d been a tenant; I knew what I wanted from landlords.
The reality was sobering.
I’d lose track of who’d paid rent because payments came from different accounts with different (or no) reference numbers. I’d have the same maintenance conversation three times with different tenants. I’d scramble for documents when I needed them. Despite good intentions, I’d occasionally drop the ball—miss a renewal deadline, forget to chase a contractor.
I wasn’t a bad landlord. I was a normal person trying to manage a complex, ongoing relationship using tools that weren’t fit for purpose. WhatsApp groups, spreadsheets, email threads—digital chaos pretending to be organisation.
What I Found (And Didn’t Find)
I researched what existed. The rental tech landscape had two types of platforms:
**Listing sites** (Rightmove, Zoopla, OpenRent)—brilliant for finding properties and tenants, but offering nothing for what happens after move-in.
**Professional landlord platforms**—sophisticated tools for letting agents managing hundreds of properties. Expensive, complex, complete overkill for someone with one or two properties.
Small landlords—nearly half the UK rental market—had been completely overlooked. We were too small for professional tools but managing relationships too complex for consumer apps.
And tenants? Invisible. Treated as passive data points rather than active participants.
The Moment of Clarity
One specific issue crystallised everything: **partial rent payments**.
A tenant hits a rough patch—student loan delayed, hours cut, unexpected expense. They can pay half now, the rest in two weeks. This is reasonable. Most landlords would prefer partial payment over nothing. Most tenants want to maintain their rental history.
But no infrastructure exists to handle this simply. Banks don’t track it. Standing orders don’t split payments. Landlords manually note everything. Tenants lose track of what they owe. Misunderstandings multiply.
It pointed to something bigger: the rental market had never been designed around how people actually live.
People’s financial lives are messy. Communication is messy. Boilers break at inconvenient times. People lose documents. That’s reality. The system needed to accommodate it, not demand reality conform to rigid, outdated processes.
Building August
When I started building August in early 2023, I had a few core principles:
- Focus on management, not marketplace. The finding/matching problem was solved. The 12-36 months after that match? That’s where we’d live.
- Build for both sides. Landlords and tenants needed shared visibility. One source of truth, reducing miscommunication, building trust.
- Make it feel consumer, not enterprise. Small landlords won’t use clunky platforms requiring training. This needed to feel like WhatsApp or Instagram.
- Be intelligent about information. Why manually input data that already exists? August Intelligence auto-populates property profiles from just a postcode—council info, EPC ratings, local statistics, crime rates. Your property starts 80% complete. More importantly, we use this data to give genuinely useful, property-specific insights.
- Solve unglamorous problems that matter. Partial rent payments. Document storage. Maintenance tracking. Renewal reminders. Not sexy, but they’re daily realities.
What August Actually Is
Two years in, August is what I think of as a smart assistant for renting, powered by AI.
Landlords get rent tracking with partial payment flexibility, simple maintenance management, centralized document storage, automatic reminders for compliance and renewals, and analytics that actually help spot trends.
Tenants get clarity on payments, easy issue reporting, document access when needed, clear communication channels, and reminders that keep them on top of obligations and understand the market.
The goal isn’t eliminating human interaction. Renting is about relationships between people. The goal is eliminating the friction and miscommunication that gets in the way of those relationships working.
Why This Matters
The UK has 4.4 million privately rented households and 2.7 million landlords—95% owning fewer than five properties. These aren’t corporations. They’re regular people with a spare property, often working full-time jobs.
Meanwhile, regulatory requirements have exploded. For professional agents with systems, it’s manageable. For individual landlords doing this part-time? It’s overwhelming. Many are leaving the market entirely.
When small landlords leave, they’re replaced by institutional operators or properties sold into owner-occupation. Neither outcome helps tenants facing a housing shortage.
August exists to help small landlords stay in the market by making it genuinely manageable. And in doing so, to improve the experience for millions of tenants who rely on this segment.
What’s Next
My initial ambition was modest—solve my own problem, maybe help a few hundred landlords.
But I’ve realised there’s something bigger here. August isn’t just a property management tool. It’s infrastructure for the rental relationship.
Imagine rent collection as simple and automatic as Netflix, with flexibility for when life happens. Maintenance triaged by AI and auto-matched with contractors. Compliance as an automatic background process. Portable reputation scores for responsible landlords and tenants alike.
We’re not there yet. But that’s the direction.
The rental market is one of the last major sectors of consumer life without proper infrastructure. Not marketplace apps that help you find something once, but genuine infrastructure that makes the ongoing relationship work.
Why I’m Still Here
I remember what it felt like to be a student tenant, powerless and anxious. And I remember being a landlord, genuinely trying to do right but drowning in admin.
Both sides are filled with decent people trying to navigate a system that makes it unnecessarily hard. That’s not a technical problem at its core. It’s a human problem.
August is my attempt to make it better. Every time I hear from someone who says “this just makes sense,” it reinforces why this matters.
Renting is how millions of people live. It deserves better tools.
We’re building them.
Try to August
https://www.augustapp.com
