Nestd

Nestd came out of first-hand frustration: finding a rental in the Greater Toronto Area is miserable. Listings are spread across a dozen sites, the good ones vanish in hours, and the big national platforms aren’t tuned for how competitive Toronto actually is. Nestd is a GTA-first rental platform built to make that search less of a part-time job.

What I built

• Map-first search built on Mapbox, because in the GTA location and commute drive every decision.
• Filters that match real behaviour — neighbourhood, budget, and commute — instead of an endless wall of checkboxes.
• A data model in PostgreSQL for listings, neighbourhoods, and saved searches, with a Next.js and TypeScript front end.

Why it matters

The hard part of a marketplace isn’t the front end — it’s supply, freshness, and trust. Nestd was where I started thinking seriously about those problems: how listings get in, how they stay current, and how you earn enough trust that someone will actually move on a place they found through you. I pitched it to investors here in Toronto as a wedge into one painful market rather than a thin clone of the national sites — focus as a feature.