I rented my worst apartment without ever seeing it.

My semester abroad in San Diego changed my life — I knew I wanted to live abroad. So I went all in: a master's degree in Rotterdam, applying from Germany. And then came the part nobody warns you about: finding a place to live in a country you can't visit, in a language you don't speak, on a budget that says “student.”

I did everything right. I compared listings for weeks. I asked for extra photos. I even had a short walkthrough video, and a rule for myself: I wouldn't wire a cent if anything felt off. Nothing felt off. So I paid the deposit from 1,000 km away, because “there are other applicants.”

The flat I walked into was not the flat in the pictures. The “bright, cozy” room faced a wall. The bathroom had mold in every corner the camera had carefully avoided. None of it was technically a scam — there was no one to report, nothing to get back. Just a year of my life, decided by photos taken with a wide-angle lens, years earlier, in better light.

And I was one of the lucky ones. Since moving to Estonia I've heard much worse versions again and again in expat groups: deposits wired to landlords who never existed. Keys that were “with DHL.” The same apartment rented to four people at once. The median loss in a rental scam is around €900 — for a student, that's not an inconvenience, that's the semester budget.

So I built the thing I needed back then.

FlatCheck analyzes a rental walkthrough video — the one you ask the landlord to send, or take yourself if a friend can visit — and checks it for what I didn't know to look for: water damage and mold the camera “happens” to skip, staging tricks, rooms that don't match the listing, prices that don't match the district. You get a plain-English report in minutes, before you wire anything to anyone.

It won't catch everything. No tool can promise that, and I won't either. But it would have caught my apartment. And if the analysis fails on our end, you get your money back automatically — that's written into the system, not just this page.

If you're moving to Estonia to study: your first check is free. The 2014 version of me couldn't have justified even €9 — and that's exactly the person this is for.