What Haven is

One system for the whole tenancy, not a listings board #

Most rental sites do one thing: they show you homes, then step aside. The moment you want to apply, prove who you are, sign a lease, pay a deposit, or report a leak, you are back to email threads, an agency office, a notary, and a bank transfer you hope lands on the right day. Every handoff is a place where things get lost, delayed, or marked up.

Haven closes those gaps. Discovery, application, identity verification, the lease and its signatures, rent, the deposit, maintenance, insurance, invoices, renewal, and move-out all live in one continuous record. A tenancy is not a folder of scattered PDFs, it is a single timeline that both sides can see.

Because it is one system, the state is always shared. When rent is paid, both the renter and the owner see it at the same moment. When a lease is signed, the signed copy is there for everyone who is party to it. Nobody has to ask for a receipt or a status update, because the record is the source of truth.

Three apps, one design language #

Haven is three products built on the same foundation. The Renter app (iOS and web) is where people find a home, apply, sign, pay rent, and raise anything that needs fixing. The Owner app (iOS and web) is where a landlord lists a property, reviews applicants, signs the lease, and watches rent and deposits settle. The Admin console is the operator's cockpit, the tools we use to run the platform, resolve edge cases, and keep the system honest.

They share one design language, so the same idea looks and behaves the same way whether you are the renter, the owner, or the operator. That consistency is not cosmetic. It means a lease, a payment, or a maintenance ticket is the exact same underlying object on every screen, no reconciliation, no two versions of the truth.

We build for people who are not power users. Many owners are not renting professionally, and every screen is meant to be legible to someone doing this for the first time. The interface should get out of the way.

What Haven does at each stage, in one sentence each #

Discovery. Browse real, available homes with honest detail, no phantom listings, no bait.

Application. Apply in a few minutes; the owner sees a complete, comparable profile instead of a stack of attachments.

Identity verification. Both sides confirm who they are before any money or lease is on the line.

Lease e-signature. The lease is drafted, agreed, and signed electronically; the signed document is captured and kept immutable.

Rent. Rent runs on SEPA autopay, so it collects on schedule without anyone chasing a transfer.

Deposit. The security deposit is held in escrow, kept separate and released against the agreed terms, not sitting in a landlord's account.

Maintenance. Report an issue from the app; it becomes a tracked request with a clear owner and status.

Insurance. Cover for the home and the tenancy is arranged in the same flow rather than as a separate errand.

Invoices. Every charge and payment produces a clean record you can actually reconcile.

Renewal. When the term ends, renewing is a decision, not a fresh round of paperwork.

Move-out. The deposit is settled against the record, and the tenancy closes cleanly.

Portfolio. Owners see every property, tenancy, and payment in one view instead of a spreadsheet they maintain by hand.

How the money actually works #

The financial parts are the ones people worry about most, so they are built to be verifiable rather than trusted on faith.

Rent moves by SEPA autopay: the renter authorizes the mandate once, and rent is then collected on its due date. No standing order to remember, no late transfer, no manual reconciliation on the owner's side.

The deposit is held in escrow, a separate holding account, not the landlord's pocket. It is released according to the terms both sides agreed to, which is what a deposit is supposed to be.

Underneath, money is tracked with double-entry accounting. Every cent that moves is a journal entry, and balances are derived from those entries rather than edited in place. That is the same discipline banks and serious financial systems use, and it means the ledger can always be traced and audited. Legal artifacts, leases, signatures, payment records, are append-only: a correction is a new record that references the old one, never a quiet edit.

Who Haven is for, and where we start #

Haven is for two people: the renter who wants a home without the friction, the markups, and the uncertainty of the traditional process, and the owner who wants their property rented, their rent collected, and their obligations handled without an agency taking a cut of everything.

The economics are deliberately simple. Renters pay nothing, €0 to search, apply, sign, and pay rent through Haven. Owners keep about 99% of the rent they collect: Haven takes roughly 1% of rent collected, plus a small per-placement fee when a tenancy begins. There is no percentage-of-a-month agency commission and no listing paywall.

We are starting in Malta, in a private beta, and expanding across Europe from there. Starting narrow lets us get the hard parts, money, contracts, verification, right in one market before we widen. What is live is live; what is not, we do not pretend is.

Where to go next in Learn #

If you want the mechanics of a single stage, each has its own page, how applications are reviewed, how the deposit escrow works, how SEPA autopay is set up, how the lease is signed and stored.

If you are an owner, start with listing a property and reviewing applicants. If you are a renter, start with how to find a home and what an application asks for.

And if you want the honest state of what is built versus what is planned, the roadmap is the single scoreboard, it tells you exactly where Haven is today, without rounding up.