spyrae/kronos-agent-os/housing-search

Housing Search

Before searching

Six answers, and searching without them wastes the search:

1. Dates and length of stay. A month is a different market from a week —

monthly rates on the big platforms run far below thirty nightly rates, and a search priced per night answers a question nobody asked.

1. Total budget, not the nightly figure. The number that matters is rent for

the whole stay plus deposit plus utilities plus fees.

1. Area, at the granularity the owner actually cares about.
2. Non-negotiables — the two or three things whose absence rules a place out

(air conditioning, a desk, a kitchen, parking).

1. Who is staying — children, pets and long-stay guests all change what is

available and what it costs.

1. When they need to decide. It changes whether to shortlist three or thirty.

Anything the owner has told you before lives in notes/user/. Ask only for what is missing, and ask once.

Searching

Search each site separately and in parallel; they overlap less than people expect. Fetch listing pages with fetch_page — search-result pages reorder themselves and are worth less than they look.

Signed in, prices and availability differ. If the owner has an account for the site, open it first (open_site_session) and say in the result whether you were signed in — an unsigned search is a different set of prices, and presenting it as theirs is a small lie that compounds.

What a listing does not tell you

Collect these per candidate, and never fill one in by assumption. A listing that does not state the deposit is not a listing with no deposit; a missing figure is not a zero one, and treating it as one puts the least documented place at the top of the list:

• deposit: amount, and what returns it
• utilities: who pays, and what they actually run to in the hot or cold season
• minimum stay, and what leaving early costs
• what is not included — cleaning, linen, agency fee, tourist tax
• who repairs what, and how quickly
• internet: the real speed, not the advertised one

Red flags

Worth naming to the owner rather than silently down-ranking:

• no photo of the bathroom or the kitchen
• reviews that all appear within one week, or none at all
• a price far below the cluster for that area, with nothing in the listing

explaining why

• the location shown only as a district
• the same photographs appearing on other listings
• pressure to move the conversation or the payment off the platform

Comparing

Use compare_offers: recurring costs are rent and utilities, one-off costs are deposit, cleaning and fees, and periods is the number of months. It ranks on money and refuses to rank a listing missing a cost — which is the correct outcome, not a gap to paper over.

Then judge the rest yourself, out loud: a place ten minutes further out for a third less is a trade the owner makes, not the arithmetic.

Waiting

Enquiries take days. Do not hold the conversation open — start a plan (plan_start), add a step per landlord, and a comparison step that depends on all of them. A landlord who never answers fails their step; the comparison still runs, with that absence stated.

Output

• Shortlist, ranked by total cost for the whole stay, with the arithmetic shown
• What is unknown per listing, and what you asked
• Red flags, named
• Your recommendation and the tradeoff it accepts