Finding affordable housing in New York City has long been an exhausting, demoralizing, and often hopeless experience, even for adults with resources and connections. For many families, the process is a blur of endless viewings, rejected applications, long lines at open houses, and the sinking realization that the city’s soaring rents outpace nearly everyone’s budget.

For Beckett Zahedi, the search for an affordable home was not just a childhood memory; it became the motivation behind a high-tech solution. Now 17, Beckett spent his early years accompanying his newly divorced father and younger sister across Brooklyn in search of a place they could afford. They trudged through crowded lobbies, squeezed into tiny rooms, and inspected apartments where cockroaches roamed freely. After repeated rejections, the toll on the family was emotional and financial.

That formative experience stuck with him. And as he grew older, Beckett’s natural entrepreneurial spirit began to merge with a budding interest in technology. He launched websites to sell toys and T-shirts, but the memory of the stressful apartment hunt lingered in the background. So when his high school economics class began studying the nationwide housing crisis, Beckett realized he could channel his skills into a real-world solution.

Together with classmate Derrick Webster Jr., he conceived Realer Estate, an online platform designed to help New Yorkers discover rent-stabilized and below-market listings in a city where such opportunities are notoriously opaque.

A Summer Spent Learning to Code

Unlike most tech founders, Beckett didn’t start with years of formal training. Instead, he dove head-first into self-education.

“I basically spent the first two months of summer in my room learning from YouTube and A.I.,” he said. “Those were my teachers.”

While other teens were at camps or hanging out at the beach, Beckett was mastering programming languages and problem-solving his way through error after error. Derrick focused on another crucial part of the platform: a system that could email users about new listings matching their criteria.

By July, after countless late nights and trial-and-error debugging, the pair launched Realer Estate, a sleek, functional website that did something New York City itself had never managed to accomplish: give residents a way to search specifically for rent-stabilized units and identify apartments priced below market value.

Solving a Problem Adults Have Long Failed to Fix

New York has roughly a million rent-regulated apartments, but finding them is notoriously difficult. There’s no publicly accessible database of individual rent-stabilized units. Instead, tenants must wade through government PDFs that list entire buildings, many of which contain only one or two rent-regulated apartments. Even those records can be outdated or inaccurate.

On the other side of the affordability spectrum is the NYC Housing Connect lottery system, which attracts hundreds of applicants for every available unit. The demand far overwhelms supply, leading many would-be renters to spend years waiting for good news that never comes.

Real-estate professionals, policymakers, and renters have complained for years about the lack of a centralized, user-friendly tool for finding affordable rentals. Beckett and Derrick decided to build one themselves.

Their platform scans active rental and sales listings and cross-references them with the city’s database of rent-stabilized buildings. It then evaluates affordability based on factors like price per square foot, number of bedrooms, amenities, and comparable properties. Apartments priced at least 15% under the local market rate appear as “undervalued,” giving users a clearer sense of the opportunity.

“It’s not perfect,” Beckett admitted, “but it helps renters understand how good of a deal an apartment is.”

A Big Impact: Powered by Teen Determination

Despite being built by two high-school seniors on their bedroom computers, Realer Estate has taken off quickly. More than 27,000 people have already visited the site.

Local officials have taken note as well. New York City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams publicly praised Beckett during a Council meeting, expressing admiration for his commitment to helping New Yorkers find affordable housing.

Real-estate agents are paying attention too. One agent, Tiger Liu of Compass, was impressed enough to give the teens $1,000 for advertising. He reported that a user from the platform recently went into contract on an apartment, a major proof of concept for the young founders.

Meanwhile, the entrepreneurship startup Audos has committed to investing up to $25,000 into the project. While the founders are still minors, the firm sees tremendous potential and plans to provide mentorship as well as funding.

Behind the Scenes: Late Nights, Crashes, and Collaboration

Building the platform hasn’t been easy. Derrick recalled nights when he introduced a new feature only for it to break parts of the site, forcing him and Beckett to jump on midnight calls to fix issues before school the next morning.

The trial-and-error nature of coding was a humbling experience for Beckett.

“It was just failing, getting every line wrong, until it all fell into place,” he said.

The two teens split responsibilities based on their strengths, with Beckett carrying the bulk of programming and Derrick focusing on the user experience and alert system. Both emphasize how essential collaboration has been to the platform’s progress.

In their first few months, they earned about $2,600 from users who signed up for email alerts, just enough to cover computing costs and server fees.

Learning Housing Policy Between Classes

Despite operating a highly technical housing tool, both founders are still full-time students. Beckett attends community board meetings in his spare time to learn more about housing issues and government processes. The demands of the project have been so intense that he gave up playing basketball this year, though he jokingly admits he wasn’t very good anyway.

Behind him during interviews, his younger sister’s loft bed hangs overhead in their Brooklyn apartment, a reminder of the cramped spaces that sparked his motivation in the first place.

A Work in Progress With Big Ambitions

Realer Estate is still evolving. Some neighborhoods have sparse data. Affordability scores may not capture every nuance. And the teen founders continue refining their algorithm while balancing schoolwork, college applications, and extracurriculars.

But their mission remains clear: help as many New Yorkers as possible access housing they can actually afford.

Even the city is beginning to adopt ideas similar to theirs. A City Council-mandated housing lottery notification system mirrors the very alert system Derrick built months earlier. Far from seeing this as competition, the teens view it as validation.

“We want to see how we can be more involved with the city,” Derrick said. “There are so many more people we can help.”

 

A Teen-Built Tool With Real Potential

In a city where adults with decades of experience have struggled to solve the affordability crisis, the success of Realer Estate is a reminder that innovation often comes from unexpected places.

Two high school students, armed with determination, late-night coding marathons, and a deep understanding of their families’ struggles, managed to build something genuinely useful, something millions of New Yorkers desperately need.

And if their early results are any indication, this may be just the beginning.