People who move on purpose
You're choosing a place for the light, the view and the quiet as much as the rent, and you'll happily spend an evening working out whether the 03 line faces the water.
North star
Know which place you'd pick,
and why, before you tour.
Every listing site is built to show you more listings. HomeCompass is built to help you stop looking — to turn forty maybes into a ranked short list you can defend to the person you're moving with.
What it is
A private chart table for one move. You bring the places you're considering; it holds the facts that decide between them — which way the windows face, what they look at, how long the airport run really takes, how much space you get per dollar — and keeps your ranking, your notes and your tour answers in one place.
What it isn't
Not a listings feed. There is no inventory, no availability API and no sponsored ordering — nobody pays to rank higher here. It doesn't replace touring either; it decides which tours are worth your Saturday.
Who it's for
Two people who have to agree
One long list, shared criteria, explicit trade-offs. The compare table settles arguments that "I liked the second one" cannot.
Anyone waiting on one specific unit
You don't want the building, you want 3406 — or whatever opens next on that stack above floor 20. Track the exact numbers, ranked.
What it does that listing sites don't
-
Orientation is a fact, not a guess
Each building's outline comes from OpenStreetMap, and every wall is turned into a facade: its compass bearing, the street on that side, what sits in that direction — water, mountains, a skyline — and when it gets sun. Pick a favorite direction and the whole map re-sorts around it. No listing site will tell you that the 2nd Avenue side faces SW 222° into the sunset over the bay.
-
You rank units, not properties
A building isn't a choice; an apartment number is. Rank real units and the stacks you're waiting on, with square feet, dollars per square foot and which way each one looks.
-
Distance measured to your life
Drive and transit time to the airport, plus hotspots you define — work, the gym, family — timed from every place at once and drawn on the map, not buried in a details tab.
-
Your criteria, your weights, your words
Ratings for views, gym, reviews and location that you set and change; the tour questions you always forget to ask, answered per building; notes that started as your own research and stay editable.
-
Groups you define, branchable
One search per group — a city, a year, a budget. Branch a group to explore a different plan without disturbing the first one.
How it knows
Nothing here is scraped from a broker, and nothing is invented. Every derived number comes from an open source and is labeled as an estimate where it is one.
- Coordinates
- Nominatim (OpenStreetMap)
- Building outlines & streets
- Overpass (OpenStreetMap) — a podium outline can be wider than the tower above it, so check Street View on close calls
- Facade bearings & sun
- Computed from the outline: outward normal per wall, plus bearings to named landmarks
- Drive times
- OSRM, free-flow. Rush hour is free-flow × 1.6 — a rule of thumb, not a promise
- Transit
- Published schedule times per station, with the lines and stops drawn from OpenStreetMap
- Rent, size, reviews, vibes
- You. This is your research, kept legible
Your data stays yours
Your short list lives in your own browser. Sign in and it also syncs to your account — one private record, yours alone — so the same list opens on your laptop and your phone. No analytics, no tracking pixels, no selling your attention back to the buildings you're considering, and no lead form handing your details to a leasing office. Export gives you the whole thing as a JSON file to keep, move or delete at any time.
The only calls this app makes are for map tiles, geocoding and routing through open public APIs, and your own sync.
map Back to the map