METROX Is Built by One Person. And That's Why It Works.

When you Google "buy apartment Vienna," the first page looks identical every time: the big portals, the agencies, the developer ads. They show listings. None of them tell you how the market is actually moving. Where it's heating up. Where it's cooling. Which districts the 2026 rent reform pushed into a corner — and which ones, paradoxically, gained demand because of it. Where the asking price is 15% above the real transaction price.

That's METROX.

And METROX is built by one person. Me.

METROX is a public demand index for the DACH real estate market. A 0–100 scale per district: where public attention is high, and where the market has gone quiet. Coverage today: Vienna (23 districts), Graz (17), Linz (9), Munich (25), and Kyiv (19) as a reference market.

Alongside the demand index — actual €/m² prices from official sources: ImmoScout24 Wohnindex, EHL Wohnmarktbericht, Wohnungsbörse, Bundesbank Wohnimmo, LUN.ua. No fabricated numbers. Every figure is sourced.

The dashboard is open. No registration, no signup, no cookie wall. You open it, you see the data, you leave. If you want, you can export the numbers, hand them to your analyst, drop them into your investor deck. No subscription required.

I'm Alexander Lischuk. I know the Vienna real estate market from the inside — seven years in real estate marketing in Vienna. Ukrainian-Austrian background. That means I understand how MRG and Mietpreisbremse work in practice — and how Eastern European markets, where the data is structured very differently, work in parallel.

METROX is my side project. No funding, no investors, no five-year exit clock. It's an experiment: can one person, using modern AI tools, build infrastructure-grade product that used to require a team of twenty?

So far, the answer is yes. With caveats.

A serious DACH-focused proptech startup is not an attractive bet for venture funds. The Vienna market is small: 1.9 million people. Austria as a whole — 9 million. ImmoScout24 and willhaben dominate. Margins are thin. Growth is bounded.

So the funds go to the US, London, Berlin. Vienna doesn't make it onto the slide. Meanwhile, the local market is too fragmented to fund a real proptech effort itself.

In that gap, a paradox emerges: a large startup can't make the unit economics work here, but one person with AI tools can.

Concretely, what I mean. To build a product like METROX five years ago, you'd have needed:

• Two frontend developers
• Two backend developers
• A data engineer
• An SEO specialist
• A content manager handling three languages
• A product designer
• A product manager

Eight people, $50K–80K each per year at DACH rates, equals about $500K a year minimum in headcount. Plus marketing.

What I have today:

• Me (full-stack, product, content, SEO)
• Claude Code and other AI agents handling routine code
• An analyst-consultant who doesn't write a line of code — he validates the data daily and publishes methodology notes
• Apify for occasional external data pipelines (no scraping — public APIs only)

The budget is 50× smaller. Decision-making speed is instant. Every morning I wake up and decide: what's broken, what we're improving, what topic we're publishing. No standups, no Jira, no Slack-channel debates.

A few things I didn't understand when I started. Things that matter to anyone buying property in Vienna.

Asking price ≠ transaction price. Every site you browse for apartments shows asking prices — what the seller wants. The actual transaction price averages 5–15% lower. For premium segments (Innere Stadt, new developments from Bauträger), the gap can be 20% or more. ImmoScout doesn't print this on its homepage. I do.

The 2026 rent reform turned rental prices into a useless signal. Mietpreisbremse limits indexation of existing contracts to 1% in 2026 and 2% in 2027. So when you look at "average rent per m² in Vienna," you're looking at a number bounded by formula, not by demand. To see where rental demand is actually concentrated, you have to look at demand directly — which is exactly what METROX does.

Vienna's 23 districts are 23 different markets. In the 1st Bezirk (Innere Stadt), median sale price exceeds €14,000/m². In the 22nd (Donaustadt), it's €5,500. This isn't one city — it's 23 micro-markets with different demographics, different building stock, different dynamics. If you're investing in Vienna and orienting on "city average," you're investing in fiction.

The ECB has held the deposit rate at 2.00% since June 2025. Mortgage rates sit at 3.4%. A 100% investment buy in the premium segment yields 2.5–4% gross — meaning, after rates and tax, you're effectively betting on long-term capital appreciation, not cash flow. Knowing that before you tour the first apartment saves months.

Honestly. Not for drama — for clarity.

Daily data maintenance. I update the Demand Index every day for five cities. Every. Morning. If I'm sick, or if another deadline hits, the data lags. A real company has redundancy. I don't.

Legal cleanliness. Real estate copy in Austria is a minefield. What you can say, what you can't, which disclaimer is mandatory. I've read MRG, Maklergesetz, MieWeG, ImmoESt more times than most lawyers. And I still run a copy-guard before every publication — an automated script that scans for 47 forbidden phrasings in every article. That's not paranoia. That's necessity.

You can't test everything. With one person, you can't run an A/B test on 100 users because your daily user base is 200–300 people. Decisions get made on instinct and competitor signals.

The biggest pain — scaling. Today I run five cities. Fifty alone is impossible. That's where it stops being a one-person play and either becomes a partnership / investment / team — or it stays a niche DACH tool.

That's exactly why I'm writing this.

If you're a proptech investor. METROX sits in a niche the big funds skip — DACH is too small for them, and the niche is now ready to scale. Methodology validated, infrastructure in place, brand starting to index in AI search (Perplexity, ChatGPT Search, Claude). With the right capital and the right partner, you can cover Central Europe end-to-end in 18 months.

If you're a developer or agency. I can give you a transparent view of your market: where demand is rising, where it's cooling, how your districts compare to the city. No funnels, no subscriptions. If you have a case where METROX data could strengthen your client or investor pitch — write me.

If you're a journalist or researcher. All the data is open. But we can give you more — methodology notes, the stories behind the numbers, early access to new cities.

If you're just buying an apartment in Vienna. Open the dashboard. No registration, no signup. Look at the district you're interested in. Compare it to the neighbours. It's a tool for people making serious financial decisions, who want to make them with eyes open.

Coming weeks — Salzburg and Innsbruck launches. After that — Berlin, Prague, Warsaw. In parallel — methodology improvements (new input: Meta Ads Reach Estimator).

I don't know how this ends. Maybe in a year, it's a team of five and a banking partnership. Maybe it stays a niche tool used by people who know my last name.

But one thing I'm certain about: if anything useful in DACH proptech ships in the next 24 months, it won't come from Berlin or London. It'll come from Vienna, from a small office, where one person sits with a laptop and too much coffee.

Email: [email protected]

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/aleksandr-lishchuk

I respond personally. There's nobody else in the team. That's a weakness and a strength at the same time.

• Public dashboard Vienna: metrox.io/en/vienna/dashboard
• Methodology: metrox.io/en/methodology
• About METROX: metrox.io/en/about