Luu Ngoc Huyen and her website (Photo: UEVF)
After six years of living and working in France, Luu Ngoc Huyen understands the difficulties in finding a rental house or room of Vietnamese people in France, especially overseas Vietnamese students and those who have just come to France, while their foreign language skill is not good and don’t know ways in expensive Paris.
In fact, finding a rental house or roommate to share rental spending depends on luck. For a long time, finding a rental house or roommates mainly took place on an online group of the Vietnamese Student Association in France (UEVF).
However, with nearly 60,000 members, every day there are thousands of approved posts. Following and finding posts on rental houses or roommates is very difficult for both renters and tenants.
Therefore, in May, during the time of social distancing in France, Luu Ngoc Huyen officially started to solve the above problem. After about 1 or 2 weeks of creating and registering, the website for finding a rental house or roommates in Vietnamese language made debut, called "Vietcoloc".
As its name suggests, Vietcoloc is a gathering place for long-term/short-term rental rooms. With a few simple steps to register, renters can login and post news about their rental room or house. Because it is a specialized website for renting, this will help everyone, especially overseas Vietnamese students and employees, easily find a rental room or house.
At the same time, it also helps house owners or those who have demand to re-rent their room to easily post and follow their post. This is a web version of search and renting like Airbnb, but it is reserved and convenient for Vietnamese people only.
“Of course, the Vietcoloc website still needs to continue to improve for more convenience for users. However, initially, its interface has all the necessary basic features. Not only that, I also put artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to prevent malicious activities on the website,” shared Huyen.
To establish the web, Huyen has also received consulting and support from her friends. Some of her friends also advised her not to set up a free website because there are many troubles relating to local legal issues if the website is not managed carefully.
“I am very grateful for the advice and suggestions from my friends, but I think that I am still young and would like to contribute a bit of help to the Vietnamese community abroad. If I was afraid, I wouldn't be able to do anything, even just a little for everyone. On the other hand, the establishment of the website is not only useful for the community, but also for me. Because this is also a way to help me learn more, practice one more skill for myself,” she said.
At present, the only desire of Huyen is that Vietcoloc website can reach out and spread to help many Vietnamese who have studied and lived in France and many countries in the world in the future in finding rental house or roommates.
“I personally find the idea of the website very interesting and its interface is also very friendly to users. Especially, it has both Vietnamese and English, suitable for students studying English programs in France. Hopefully more and more homeowners will use this website in the near future so that students can quickly access information on rental houses besides the UEVF page, which is also an indispensable information channel,” Anne Truong, an overseas Vietnamese student shared about the website./.