What working through a pandemic taught me about a market that was already broken.
I'm going to say something that might sound strange coming from someone who used to work in the letting industry. The agency model, the way it operates in Malta — it's not really a service. I mean it looks like one. It has offices and contracts and people in suits doing viewings. But when you step back and look at what's actually happening, what you're paying for, and who's really benefiting? I don't think most people would call that a service if they saw the full picture.
I worked as a letting agent. Right through COVID. In a market where people were still showing up, still relocating, still trying to find somewhere to live on the island while everything else was shutting down. The demand never went away. If anything it got worse because everyone was more desperate and more rushed and more willing to accept bad deals just to get it done.
And there I was in the middle of it. Collecting a fee.
What I Actually Saw on the Ground
I'm not going to pretend I was some kind of whistleblower having a moral crisis every morning. It wasn't like that. It was more like a slow realisation that built up over months until I couldn't really ignore it anymore.
The renters I dealt with were usually expats or professionals coming to Malta for iGaming, for remote work, sometimes students. People with deadlines. They'd land on the island with maybe two or three weeks of temporary accommodation booked and this growing panic about finding something permanent before that ran out. The system was not kind to them. They'd spend days messaging, waiting for replies that never came, going to viewings for places that looked completely different from the listing photos. And at the end of all that frustration they'd pay an agency fee — usually one month's rent — on top of the deposit, on top of first month. For what exactly? For someone to send them a list and open a few doors.
Look, some of those fees were deserved. Some agents did excellent work. I'm not going to sit here and trash an entire profession. But a lot of the time, the fee was just... the cost of access. That's it. You paid because that was how it worked, not because you received something proportional to what you paid.
Landlords had their own version of the same problem. The ones trying to rent out their property without an agency were basically invisible. They'd post on Facebook, put something on MaltaPark, maybe list it on Times of Malta. And within hours it was gone. Buried under agency listings. Because agencies post in volume, they dominate every portal, every search result. A private landlord with one apartment doesn't stand a chance against that. So they'd come to us eventually. Not because they wanted to. Because they ran out of options.
I keep coming back to this one thing — both sides were unhappy. At the same time. Renters couldn't find owners directly. Owners couldn't reach renters on their own. And the industry sitting between them was making money from that dysfunction. Not causing it deliberately, maybe, but definitely not motivated to fix it either.
That's what bothered me.
The Idea That Got Stuck in My Head
I don't remember the exact moment. It wasn't some dramatic epiphany. But at some point, this thought just settled in and wouldn't leave:
If someone built a way for renters and property owners to connect directly — and I mean properly, not just a classifieds board — but with actual matching so the right renter finds the right property, with trust verification so nobody's guessing who they're dealing with... agencies would become optional almost overnight.
Because here's the thing that I think people in the industry don't want to admit. Neither side actually wants the middleman. Landlords don't enjoy paying agency commissions. Renters don't enjoy paying agency fees. They do it because the alternative — going direct — is so difficult and unreliable that the agency feels like the safer bet even when it's expensive.
So you remove those barriers. You make direct work. And then what happens?
That's what I kept asking myself. Not as some business plan exercise. Just as a question I couldn't stop turning over.
The tricky part was never about building another listing site. Malta has those. The tricky part was the matching. When I was an agent, the "matching" happened in my head — I'd look at what a renter wanted, think about what I had available, and try to connect dots. Sometimes I got it right, mostly it was guesswork dressed up as expertise. The question was whether you could do that properly. Systematically. Better than a person can.
And also, how do you deal with the trust problem? Two strangers trying to arrange a rental. No one vouching for either of them. That's the part agencies quietly solve — they're the known third party. Take them away, and you need something else in that role.
What Squarelly Actually Does
I want to be specific here because I think there's a tendency with tech platforms to be vague about what they do. "We connect people." "We use AI." OK, but what does that actually mean when someone opens the app?
The compatibility scoring is the thing I'm most stubborn about. A renter fills in their profile — budget, where they want to live, lifestyle stuff, when they need to move, what they can't compromise on. And then the system doesn't just filter by price and show them everything in range. It scores properties by actual fit. How well does this specific apartment match this specific person's full situation?
The goal — and I realise this sounds ambitious — is that you see maybe three or four properties that you'd genuinely want. Not thirty that technically qualify but don't feel right. I watched so many renters burn out during my agency days because they were drowning in options that were all wrong in slightly different ways. Nobody was helping them narrow down. We were just showing them what existed.
The AI Listing Manager is probably the feature landlords will appreciate most, even though it sounds less exciting. It takes the work out of creating a listing — you put in what you know about the property, and it does the writing an agency would have charged you for. Now a landlord can do it themselves and the result looks as good as — honestly, usually better than — what an agency would produce.
Then there's how contact works. And this one I feel strongly about because it comes directly from a problem I watched happen again and again. Landlords who try to rent directly get flooded with low quality enquiries. People messaging fifteen properties in ten minutes, no real intent, just seeing what sticks. After a few rounds of that, the landlord gives up and goes back to an agency.
Squarelly's answer is a small contact fee — 2% of one month's rent. It's not a paywall. It's a signal. When a landlord receives an enquiry through the platform, they know that person has looked at the property, reviewed their compatibility score, considered whether it actually fits, and then decided it was worth paying a small amount to get in touch. That changes the conversation completely. I've seen enough ignored messages and ghosted enquiries to know that the quality of the first contact determines everything.
And both sides verify identity through KYC before anything happens. No anonymous profiles. No guessing.
Why Start in Malta
I get asked this and I think people expect some kind of market research answer. Total addressable market, growth projections, competitive landscape analysis.
It's simpler than that. Malta is where I was. Malta is the market I actually understood — not from reading reports but from working in it. I know which areas rent fast and which ones sit empty. I know what makes a landlord lose sleep. I know exactly what renters hate about the process because I heard it directly, repeatedly, for years. That kind of knowledge doesn't come from a spreadsheet.
The island is also, honestly, a perfect place to test this. It's small enough that word of mouth travels fast. High expat population with constant turnover. Students arriving every year. Rents that have climbed way faster than local salaries. And a letting sector that hasn't had any real competition or disruption in decades.
You build in the market you know. You prove it there. Then you go wider.
Why I'm Actually Doing This
I could write something inspirational here about wanting to revolutionise the housing market or empower people through technology. But that would be dishonest. The real reason is more personal and probably less impressive.
I got tired. Not of working hard — that part was fine. I got tired of watching the same bad outcomes repeat. Renters overpaying for introductions that weren't worth the price. Landlords losing months of rental income because they couldn't get visibility without an agency. A system that worked for the system itself more than for the people actually renting and letting properties.
I don't think the agency model is going to collapse tomorrow or anything dramatic like that. Some landlords will always prefer to hand everything off to a professional. Fair enough. But I do think a large number of landlords and renters have been waiting for an alternative for years and just haven't had one. The technology to do matching properly, to verify identity remotely, to let owners create professional listings without help — none of that existed in Malta in an accessible way until now.
I'm not claiming Squarelly is going to fix everything overnight. But I am saying that once you give both sides the tools to connect directly, and you make that connection better and cheaper than what an agency offers... a lot of people are going to wonder why they were paying the middleman in the first place.
That's the bet. And I'm quite comfortable making it.
Squarelly is built by Fulcrum Station Ltd, registered in Malta. If you're a property owner or a renter who wants to be part of the early access community, sign up here.