The story behind RentalAlert

Hi — I’m the person behind RentalAlert.

In 2024, after my third redundancy, I made a decision. Instead of sitting at home waiting for the next role (and the next payout), I’d finally do the thing I’d been putting off: go and actually live somewhere new for a while. Australian rent being what it is, Southeast Asia made all the sense in the world — cheaper living, some of the best food on earth, and a whole region to explore while I worked out my next move.

I started in Penang. It was a deliberately soft landing — affordable, English widely spoken, and food worth crossing an ocean for. From there it was about eighteen months on the move: up to Kuala Lumpur, over into Thailand (Bangkok and I never quite clicked — not helped by my wallet getting stolen two hours off the plane — but Hua Hin and Chiang Mai were a different story), then Cambodia, where Siem Reap and Kampot completely won me over, and finally Vietnam. Da Nang was the spot. Ho Chi Minh City surprised me. I loved it.

Eventually it came time to head home — settle in for the long slog toward retirement, with a plan to come back to Southeast Asia for good one day. But a few months back in Australia and I couldn’t shake it. The vibe of home just wasn’t there anymore, the job market had changed while I was away, and I kept thinking about Penang and that food.

While I hunted for my next role, I wanted something to keep my hands busy. And one problem kept nagging at me from all those months abroad: finding somewhere to live was genuinely hard.The good places were scattered everywhere and moved fast — by the time I spotted something worth seeing, it was already gone. There was no simple way to see everything in one place, or to be told the moment a new, suitable rental appeared.

So I sat down and sketched out what a better way might look like: every rental worth seeing, gathered into one place, on a map, with alerts so you never miss the good ones. That sketch became rentalalert.app.

Here’s the thing you should know about me: I travel for the experiences far more than the destinations. And I’m a train person, through and through. The Trans-Siberian across Russia and the Reunification Express down Vietnam are two of the best things I’ve ever done. Some of the scenery is breathtaking — rolling into Da Nang from Hanoi through the Hai Van Pass is some of the most stunning coastline you’ll see anywhere in the world from a train window. But that’s only half of it.

The other half is the moments. Sharing cold beers and vodka with a carriage of Russian men on their way back from Lake Baikal, trying to sell us the omul they’d just caught — terrifying at first, genuinely brilliant by the end. Buying warm beers from the lady working the aisle on a Vietnamese sleeper train, the rock-hard bunks, the toilets that were a cultural experience all of their own.

RentalAlert is for people like me — people who genuinely want to go and live somewhere different for a while. There’s already more than enough to worry about when you’re moving to a new country. My hope is that finding somewhere to live can be one less thing on that list.

I’ve done the wandering, made the mistakes, and worked a lot of it out the hard way. RentalAlert is simply me trying to make your part of it a little bit easier.

And I’m not building it and walking away — I’ll be using it myself when I eventually head back. I know it works. I hope it works just as well for you.