Our Mission

In no other industry that we can think of, does the customer get treated so badly, with so little recourse when things go wrong. It would be unthinkable for a customer to have a problem with a hotel room, and be told to live with it. Similarly, an Airbnb host would rightly expect a 1 star review if they rented out a property with mould on the walls and no hot water.

That’s why we founded Treehaus. Tenants deserve a voice.

We have created the UK’s first national database of rental properties. We think we have identified between 80-90 % of all privately rented property.

But we need your help.

For our project to work, we need as many reviews from tenants as possible. In fact we are aiming for a million. If we get there, we’ll plant 100,000 trees to say thank you to the world. Trees and housing are important to us...

Over time...

Our ambition is to start to connect good landlords with tenants, without needing to use estate agents. But for now, we’ll settle for some accountability.

Our Team

Neil Nichols

Founder

Mark Brown

Chief Technology Officer

Emma Williams

Head of Communications

Rachel Duncan

Head of Legal

Treehaus was set up by entrepreneur Neil Nichols and technologist Mark Brown. Neil’s other entrepreneurial interests include businesses in the accounting and legal sector as well as not-for-profit work in the music sector, but it is his experience in the property industry that led him to establish Treehaus. With his brother, Robert Nichols, he helped set up Portico, a London based property company, but it became abundantly clear over the years that the property industry is not fair. After selling the business to LRG in 2021, Neil, together with software expert Mark, resolved to set up a project to help fix the problems in the rental industry through the creation of Treehaus.

Putting the Tree in Treehaus

As you might expect, we’re carbon neutral tree huggers.

For ages now, we’ve seen EPCs in their brightly coloured liveries, telling us almost nothing intelligible about the eco credentials of rental properties. The situation is particularly frustrating in the lettings industry, because tenants can’t do much to improve the energy efficiency of their rented properties and worse still, tenants pick up the bill if their landlords don’t operate energy efficient properties. Like many things in the lettings industry, this seems the wrong way round.

We’re focussed on two things: the carbon footprint of each property and what landlords can do to offset this.

The average property in the UK emits 6 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year, and that feels a lot more real than the collection of letters and numbers published on the EPC certificate. So that’s the language we speak. Whilst we might struggle to imagine exactly what 6 tonnes of carbon dioxide looks like, we can more easily imagine what 250 trees would look like – which is roughly how many trees it would take to absorb this much carbon dioxide in a year. We know that offsetting the carbon footprint is not quite the same as not creating carbon dioxide in the first place, but it is a good place to start, particularly where there is limited scope for improvement as a tenant.

Over time, we’ll be encouraging landlords to offset the carbon footprint of their properties. and we’ll be encouraging tenants to do the same for their lifestyles.

Treehaus itself uses carbon neutral data centres and servers, powered by energy from sustainable sources. We catch public transport to the office and when we go further afield and we can’t get public transport, we car share or use electric vehicles.