Derrick Webster Jr., left, and Beckett Zahedi in Beckett’s apartment in Brooklyn, where he lives with his mother and sister. In July, after countless bleary-eyed hours on bedroom computers, the classmates introduced Realer Estate, a website that combines public data with real estate listings, allowing users to search for below-market and rent-stabilized apartments — something the grown-ups who run New York City have never managed to do. — Graham Dickie/The New York Times
When Beckett Zahedi was in the fifth grade, he’d accompany his recently divorced father and younger sister on a grueling New York City ritual: the hunt for an affordable apartment. On weekends, they’d trudge through fruitless viewings in Brooklyn, jostling through crowds and sidestepping cockroaches until the elder Zahedi finally found a place to rent.
“I wanted to make sure that they felt comfortable in the place, and it’s hard to find something, so he had this experience over and over of being rejected,” Caveh Zahedi said of his son.
As he got older, Beckett Zahedi leaned into his entrepreneurial spirit and tech savvy, designing a website where he could sell toys, and hawking T-shirts online. But he never forgot how trying those apartment hunts had been, both emotionally and financially. So last year, as his economics class at the Brooklyn Friends school studied the national housing crisis, he and a classmate hatched an idea for an online housing platform that could help people find homes they could afford.
First, he taught himself to code. “I basically spent the first two months of summer in my room, learning from YouTube and AI,” said Zahedi, 17. “Those are my teachers.”
In July, after countless bleary-eyed hours on bedroom computers, he and Derrick Webster Jr., his classmate, launched Realer Estate, a website that combines public data with real estate listings, allowing users to search for below-market and rent-stabilized apartments – something the grown-ups who run New York City have never managed to do.
“This is basically the tool that my family needed,” said Zahedi, a lanky high school senior with a mop of wavy hair and perhaps the quintessential marker of modern youthful ambition, a LinkedIn profile. “We’d just see, like, one good apartment a month that we can afford. I thought it might be faster, instead of wasting more years, to just create an algorithm that would do that for me.”
The site has already attracted more than 27,000 visitors, along with adoration from local officials, including Adrienne Adams, the New York City Council speaker. During a council meeting in October, Adams said she was “so impressed with Beckett and his commitment to helping fellow New Yorkers secure affordable housing.”
At first, Zahedi and Webster aimed to create a nationwide platform, manually listing properties as far afield as Idaho and Texas. “It was way too much for us to handle,” Zahedi said on a recent evening, sitting beside his mother, Amanda Field, in their Brooklyn apartment, as his sister’s loft bed loomed over the dining table. So they decided to focus on New York.
“They’re children of the pandemic,” said Field, who watched Zahedi and his friends develop their digital skills during Covid lockdowns and remote schooling. “They were living their real lives in the digital world.”
The curious may wonder why two kids who aren’t old enough to vote would even need to create such a platform – as opposed to, say, New York’s vast bureaucracy.
A tenant can officially find out if their unit is rent-stabilized by submitting a request to New York State Homes and Community Renewal. But there is no public database of rent-stabilized apartments in the city, only a government website with PDF lists of buildings containing at least one such unit. And those lists may be inaccurate or outdated.
The city’s affordable-housing lottery, NYC Housing Connect, typically receives around 500 applications for each unit listed, according to the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development. Competition is fierce and waits can take years.
“There needs to be a more uniform, streamlined way for people to be able to find affordable apartments,” said Leah Goodridge, a member of the City Planning Commission. “New Yorkers suffer for it.”
At a time when the median rent in the city is about US$4,000, finding one of the roughly 1 million rent-stabilized apartments often comes down to luck, pluck and patience. Amateur sleuths will pore over obituaries for clues; hunters will bribe landlords with “key money” to obtain a coveted lease. Online, the quest has fueled a cottage industry of tips and advice.
“If you’re explicitly looking for a rent-stabilized apartment, then you have to be a big-time hustler,” said Matthew Murphy, executive director of the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy at New York University.
Zahedi and Webster are trying to make the search easier. While Zahedi built the platform over the summer, Webster, also 17, worked on creating an email system for users.
Collaboration was “really, really important,” Webster said. “Sometimes my new update to the project would crash something that he would make, and he would have to call me at midnight, saying, ‘Hey you messed up something.’”
Zahedi quickly discovered that building the site was “much harder problem-solving than in my math homework.”
“It was just failing, getting every single line wrong until it all fell into place,” he said.
His algorithm scans active sales and rental listings, cross-referenced with all rent-stabilized building addresses, and calculates affordability by comparing against similar properties based on categories including bedrooms, bathrooms, amenities and price per square foot. Users can search specifically for rent-stabilized units, or for apartments that the site calculates as affordable. Listings determined to be at least 15% below market are saved as “undervalued” on the platform, which links to StreetEasy.
“It’s not a perfect estimate, but it helps renters get a better sense of how good of a deal an apartment is,” Zahedi said.
To gauge accuracy, he consulted his father’s real estate agent and initially launched the site on Reddit, making tweaks based on the barrage of feedback he received. In the months since, Zahedi and Webster have earned about US$2,600 (enough to cover computing costs) from subscribers who have signed up for email alerts for new listings.
One local agent, Tiger Liu of Compass, was impressed enough to give the teens US$1,000 to advertise, and said his first client from the site recently went into contract on an apartment. “It’s very helpful to people because the current resource is just not enough,” he said.
Another backer is Audos, an entrepreneurship startup, which agreed to invest up to US$25,000 in the project – with some oversight. “We’re not handing a 16-year-old kid US$25,000 and letting him go crazy,” said Andres Zubillaga, an Audos founder.
The company has worked with businesses focused on moving and interior decorating, but “in terms of actually helping you with the apartment search, this is the first we’ve seen,” Zubillaga said.
While the website is largely automated, running it still consumes much of Zahedi’s and Webster’s time. “Right after school, you make sure you get all your homework done, and then it’s your whole entire night,” Webster said.
Indeed, Realer Estate is a work in progress. Some neighbourhoods have few listings, and the affordability scores are not for all budgets. The wrinkles are being ironed out between college applications, schoolwork and extracurricular activities. Zahedi has been attending community board meetings to beef up on housing issues, and chose to forgo playing on his school basketball team this year. (“I’m not super good,” he admitted.)
But like a lot of kids his age, what he is good at is the internet. Plenty of adults have tried to tackle New York’s affordable-housing problem with limited success, so why not give two high school students a chance? After all, Webster noted, the housing lottery email notification feature that the City Council will require is similar to the alert system he already built for Realer Estate.
“What we want to do is see how we can be more involved with the city, learn from them, take our experience and give back,” Webster said. “There’s a lot more people we can help.” – ©2025 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
