We're looking for our forever home. The one where our two boys grow up, where we measure their heights on a doorframe, where the backyard gets a little too muddy after it rains. My wife and I have done this before — we've bought a home, we know how the process works. And that's exactly what made this time so frustrating.
Because knowing how it works didn't make it any less chaotic.
The spreadsheet lasted about two weeks
It always starts the same way. You set up a Google Sheet. Columns for address, price, beds, baths, notes. Maybe a link to the listing. You tell yourself this time you'll keep it updated.
You won't.
Within a week, my wife was texting me Zillow links faster than I could open them. Some I'd look at during lunch. Some I'd forget about entirely. The ones I liked, I'd favorite on Zillow — which meant they'd sit in a list of 40 homes with no context for why I saved any of them. Half were already under contract.
The spreadsheet went stale almost immediately. We'd tour a house on Saturday and neither of us would update it until Tuesday, by which point we couldn't remember which one had the weird kitchen layout and which one had the neighbor's fence encroaching on the yard.
"I realized we'd seen maybe fifteen homes and I couldn't confidently tell you which five I'd want to see again," I told my wife one night. "That's a problem."
Our agent was flying blind
Here's the thing nobody warns you about: your agent is only as informed as you make them. And when your search lives across Zillow favorites, text threads, a stale spreadsheet, and your own foggy memory, your agent is working with maybe 30% of the picture.
We'd tell our agent we liked a place, forget to mention we'd already ruled out two others in the same neighborhood, then wonder why she kept sending us listings in that area. It wasn't her fault. She was doing her job with the information we gave her, and the information we gave her was a mess.
There was no shared space where everyone could see the same board. No way for her to know which homes we'd moved from "maybe" to "definitely want to see" without us explicitly telling her in a text that she'd have to scroll back through later.
I kept asking the wrong question
For weeks, I kept thinking, "There has to be a better app for this." I tried everything. Zillow, Redfin, Realtor — they're great at finding homes. They're terrible at organizing a search. Their saved lists are flat, undifferentiated, and they don't account for the fact that a home search is a process with stages. A home you just found is fundamentally different from a home you've toured and loved. Treating them the same is useless.
I looked for standalone tools. Home search trackers, comparison apps, shared lists. Either they didn't exist, or they were so clunky that the friction of using them outweighed the benefit.
That's when I stopped asking "what app should I use?" and started asking "what would this actually need to look like?"
The board changed everything
I've used Kanban boards for work for years. The idea is dead simple — cards move through columns, left to right, and you can see the state of everything at a glance. I started sketching what that would look like for a home search.
A "New" column for homes that just showed up. "Maybe" for ones worth a second look. "Show" for the ones you want to tour. "Love" for the ones that made the cut. "Pass" for the ones that didn't. Every home is a card. Drag it where it belongs. Your whole search, visible in one view.
"The moment I laid it out as a board instead of a list, I could actually think about our search," is the best way I can describe it. A list is just data. A board is a decision-making tool.
And if your agent can see the same board? Now they know exactly where you stand without you having to send a single text.
What became Homeggo
I built a prototype. Then I kept building. What started as a personal project turned into something I realized other people needed just as badly.
Homeggo is the tool I wished existed when we started our search. You create a search with your criteria, and it populates a board with matching homes. New listings show up automatically — you're not refreshing Zillow every morning hoping something new appeared. Price drops and status changes get flagged so nothing slips by. Your agent joins your board and sees exactly what you see.
It's not a listing site. Zillow and Redfin already do that well. It's the layer on top — the place where you organize, evaluate, and make decisions about the homes you've found, however you found them.
Why it matters more this time
When we bought our first home, the stakes felt lower. We were younger, more flexible, less picky. If we'd missed a listing or forgotten about a house we liked, it wasn't the end of the world.
This time is different. We're looking for the home where our boys grow up. The school district matters. The neighborhood matters. Whether there's a yard big enough for two kids who think every patch of grass is a soccer field — that matters. The margin for "we forgot about that one" is a lot thinner when the decision is this significant.
That urgency is baked into how Homeggo works. Nothing gets lost. Nothing goes stale without you knowing. Every home you've touched is on your board, in the column where you left it, with the notes and context you need to make a decision.
What's next
Homeggo is in beta right now, and it's free. I'm building in the open, shipping features weekly, and talking to every buyer and agent who will give me ten minutes of their time. The roadmap is driven by what real people tell me they need — not what I assume from a conference room.
If you're in the middle of a home search, or about to start one, I'd love for you to try it. Not because I think it's perfect — it's not, not yet — but because the alternative is another spreadsheet that dies in two weeks and a Zillow favorites list that tells you nothing.
Your home search deserves better tools. That's why Homeggo exists.
