Friend in the Know: a second opinion on homes & cars

What the listing isn't telling you. A verdict, pros, cons, and the right questions to ask. Choose with your heart and your head.

Searching for a place to buy or rent? Shopping for a used car? Listing pages are designed to show a property or used car in the best possible light. This can make it tough to spot hidden risks, judge whether the price is right, or know exactly what questions to ask a seller or an agent. That's why we built Friend in the Know. What it does Open a property or used car listing on a site we support, click the extension, and get a detailed second opinion: - Verdict: a read on what you are actually looking at. - Pricing context: how the price stacks up, using only figures the listing itself carries. - Things to check: areas of concern, and anything that looks too good to be true. - Questions to ask: tailored to what this listing left out, ready to put to the agent or seller. Save any evaluation to your free account, line up a shortlist, and compare them later at friendintheknow.com/saved. Every evaluation is written by an LLM, from the listing alone. How to get started - Add to Chrome. The extension is free. - Create a free account. No card required. - You get two evaluations to try it with, the same quality as the paid tier. They are time limited, so use them while you are actually looking. - Need more, buy a credit bundle from your account. One credit is one evaluation. No subscription, and paid credits never expire. When an LLM makes things up, and what we do about it When an LLM evaluates a listing, the failure is rarely that it breaks. It is that it produces something confident and plausible in the space where it should have said nothing at all. An evaluation is built to leave that space empty. Where the basis for an observation is not verifiable, it is left out rather than hedged with a disclaimer. Where something matters and the listing does not answer it, you get a question to put to the agent or the seller instead. Same information, in a form you can use. How it works Friend in the Know works on the major property and used car listing sites in the UK, the US and Canada: homes for sale and to rent, and used cars from dealers and private sellers. The full list of supported sites is at friendintheknow.com/supported-sites. Your data: never shared or sold for marketing purposes. Full details at friendintheknow.com/privacy. Samples: check out our sample evaluations from real listings, on every site we support. Read them and judge for yourself at friendintheknow.com/samples. Friend in the Know reads one thing: the listing data the extension sends it. Every field the site discloses, and every word the seller wrote. For cars, it also draws on what is known about the make and model, and puts that to you as questions, never as facts about this car. It may only use fields the listing actually contains. Designations and statuses are the sharpest case: whether a property sits in a conservation area, whether a building is listed, its flood zone, its school catchment. For a car, its ULEZ or Clean Air Zone standing, whether the engine has a timing belt or chain, or what engine sits behind the badge. If the listing does not state it, the evaluation does not state it either, however obvious it might look from the address or the model name. The same holds for numbers. No comparable sales, no invented running costs or insurance figures, no commute times, no figure presented as live market data. Any comparison comes from a figure the listing itself carries, such as the site's own price rating, and it says whose figure it is. We do not hold a database of sold prices, crime figures or flood maps. The description is the seller's marketing copy, and we treat it as exactly that. What we aren't We are not a portal, an agency or a dealer. We do not sell property or cars, and we take no cut when you buy one. Nobody pays to appear in an evaluation, there are no referral fees from agents, dealers, brokers, surveyors or lenders, and we carry no advertising. The only money we take is from people who buy credits. We are not a surveyor, a solicitor, a mortgage adviser or a mechanic, and an evaluation is not regulated financial, legal or tax advice. We are not affiliated with any of the sites we support, and none of them endorse us.