List today. Know who's asking.

I built Norlease because I lived the problem it solves.

While I was a student at Nipissing, a few of us spent a stretch of one summer doing what feels like a rite of passage around here: scrolling Kijiji and Facebook Marketplace, messaging landlords who never wrote back, and once, showing up to view a place that had already been rented out weeks earlier. The listing was still live. Nobody had bothered to take it down, or maybe it was never real in the first place. Multiply that by every student and newcomer trying to find a place in Northern Ontario every August, and you start to understand why “just check Kijiji” is genuinely bad advice.

There wasn't a real alternative. No dedicated rental platform for this region actually in circulation, actually trusted, actually used. So I decided to build one.

I studied Computer Science at Nipissing, and spent a semester researching multimodal video understanding, teaching computer vision systems to make sense of what's happening in a video using vision-language models. I spent three summers before that working with a professor to build a platform cataloguing his research. Norlease's photo verification, the system that checks whether a listing's photos have been reused elsewhere before, comes directly out of that background, it's the same kind of pattern-matching problem, just pointed at rental fraud instead of research papers.

Somewhere along the way I also got curious about how money actually works, enough to get licensed in life and health insurance (LLQP). I don't know yet exactly where that goes, but I like understanding the systems underneath the things people rely on. A rental market is one of them.

I chose North Bay for the same reason a lot of people do: smaller classrooms, a real sense of place, and a city small enough to know and big enough to matter, trails, lakes, forest, all twenty minutes from downtown. It's become home. Norlease starts here because this is where I saw the problem up close, and because Northern Ontario deserves better than being an afterthought for platforms built for Toronto.

Right now, it's just me. I review every ID myself. I answer the messages myself. If something's broken, I'm the one who fixes it. That won't always be true, but for now, when you use Norlease, you're dealing with the person who built it, not a support queue.