Unofficial personal tool

SpareRoom Scout

A small Chrome extension for flat-hunting. It reads your saved SpareRoom search, drafts a personalised message for each room you shortlist, and sends the ones you approve. Nothing is ever sent without your say-so.

Download for Chrome Version 0.1.0

Google Chrome on a computer — not a phone, and not Edge or Safari.

If Chrome warns that the file “isn't commonly downloaded”, open the downloads bubble, click the arrow or ⋮ next to the file and choose Keep. That warning means “uncommon”, not “harmful”.

Install in four steps

Chrome asks a couple of unusual things of you because this is not from the Web Store. Each one takes a click.

  1. Unzip the download somewhere permanent

    Mac: double-click the zip; a spareroom-scout folder appears next to it. Windows: right-click the zip → Extract All… → Extract, then open the new folder — the spareroom-scout folder inside it is the one you want.

    Move that folder somewhere permanent, such as Documents (not Downloads). Chrome loads it from wherever it sits, so if the folder moves or is deleted the extension stops working.

  2. Open the extensions page

    Click in the address bar at the top of Chrome, type chrome://extensions and press Enter. It has to be typed — links to that page do not work. (Or: the ⋮ menu in the top-right → Extensions → Manage Extensions.)

  3. Turn on Developer mode

    It is a switch in the top-right corner of that page. Flip it on; three new buttons appear.

  4. Load unpacked, then choose the folder

    Click Load unpacked and pick the spareroom-scout folder from step 1. The folder looks empty in the chooser (it only shows folders) — that is fine, click Select. SpareRoom Scout appears in the list.

    If Chrome says “Manifest file is missing or unreadable”, you picked the folder around it. Go one level deeper and choose the inner spareroom-scout folder.

Then: pin it and open the dashboard

Click the puzzle-piece icon at the right of Chrome's toolbar, press the pin next to SpareRoom Scout, then click the SpareRoom Scout icon that appears. That opens the dashboard — a normal browser tab where everything happens.

From now on, each time Chrome starts it may show a bubble headed “Disable developer mode extensions”. Click Cancel (not Disable). It appears because this is not from the Web Store; nothing is wrong.

First-time setup

  1. Sign in with Google. One click on the dashboard. Only your email address is shared, and it is used for one thing: checking you are on the friends list.
  2. Log in to spareroom.co.uk in a normal tab. The tool uses your existing SpareRoom login, the same way clicking around the site does. It never sees or stores your password.
  3. Save a search on spareroom.co.uk. Run the search you want to use (area, budget, move-in date) and click Save search. The tool works from that saved search, so it needs to exist first.
  4. Fill in “About you” in the dashboard's Settings. Who you are, what you do, what you are looking for and when you can move. The better the detail, the better the messages.

How a session goes

  1. Scrape

    It reads the rooms in your saved search and lays them out in one list, with the details that matter side by side.

  2. Draft

    For each room you shortlist it writes an opening message that refers to the actual ad and to what you put in “About you”.

  3. Review

    Read each draft and edit it freely. Nothing is sent until you approve a draft and click Send.

  4. Send

    Approved messages go out one at a time, paced like a person typing and clicking, not a burst.

“Needs manual check”: if the tool cannot confirm that a message went out, it stops and asks you to look in SpareRoom's sent folder before doing anything else. It never guesses.

Updating

The dashboard shows a banner when a new version exists. To update: download the new zip from this page, delete your old spareroom-scout folder, unzip the new one exactly as in step 1 and put it in the same place with the same name. Then restart Chrome — or open chrome://extensions and click the circular-arrow reload button on the SpareRoom Scout card.

The “Disable developer mode extensions” bubble is expected after an update too. Click Cancel.