Last summer, our apartment in Malta started well. We had bookings, good feedback and the early signs that this might actually work. Then things slowed down, and by February the calendar had been quiet for several months.

There were plenty of things I couldn't do much about. Seasonality was not going away, Airbnb's algorithm was beyond me, and I obviously couldn't convince someone who wanted to stay in Valletta that Mellieħa was really what they were looking for.

But I could make the apartment look better online.

We have a property manager because we're not in Malta day to day, and someone local needs to handle guests, cleaning, check-ins and all the practical details that make a stay work. That arrangement makes perfect sense, but it also means we can't easily change how the apartment presents itself on Airbnb or Booking whenever we feel like it.

So I did the fairly predictable software-engineer thing and built a website. I never expected it to replace Airbnb or Booking; the idea was simply to give the apartment a home of its own, with better photos, clearer information, a little more personality and somewhere it could exist outside the usual platform search results.

Once the website existed, I started thinking about what happened after someone booked as well. There was no reason for it to stop being useful the moment a reservation was made.

Because we're not there in person, and guests usually communicate through the property manager, I wanted somewhere they could find the boring but important stuff without digging through a printed folder or waiting for somebody to reply to a message: WiFi details, check-in information, house rules, emergency contacts and a few recommendations nearby.

A link in the welcome email seemed considerably more useful than a binder sitting on a table, so I added a guest page where all of that could live in one place.

The website also gave us something we hadn't really had before: somewhere for people to come back to. On Airbnb we're one listing among hundreds. If somebody stays with us, likes the apartment and decides to return a year later, I'd rather they remember the place than have to rediscover us somewhere in Airbnb's search results.

A direct booking can work better for both sides too. We save the platform fees and can share some of that saving with the guest. At that point the website stops being just a nicer brochure and becomes a small but useful part of running the rental.

Around the same time, we were getting another apartment ready: Košice Central, a small place in the old town of Košice. It was a different city, in a different country, with a different market, but it needed much the same thing: a clean, trustworthy website that wasn't simply another platform listing, practical information for guests, and somewhere to answer the same handful of questions that inevitably come up.

At some point I realised I was basically building the same thing twice. That was probably when PagesforRentals became an idea rather than just some code I'd written for our own apartments.

Košice Central also made another problem rather obvious: our Malta apartment had a terrible name. "Malta Luxury Apartment" described it, technically, but it didn't really feel like a name. It sounded more like a placeholder we'd never got around to replacing.

Košice Central was simple, but at least it felt like somewhere. You could remember it. You could tell someone where you'd stayed. The name, the website and the guest information all belonged to the same place.

So Malta Luxury Apartment eventually became Town's End Malta.

By then the pattern was fairly difficult to ignore. I'd built a website for one rental, built essentially the same thing for another, added guest pages because they were useful, and given both properties somewhere online that actually belonged to them.

I hadn't set out to build a product. There was no pitch deck and no grand plan. I was trying to solve our own problem and eventually realised that the same problem probably wasn't particularly unique.

That's where PagesforRentals came from. The idea is deliberately simple: give an independent rental a proper home online, somewhere people can discover it and understand what they're booking, somewhere useful after they've booked, and somewhere they can remember if they want to come back.

PagesforRentals is live now, as are the two apartments that accidentally produced it: Town's End Malta and Košice Central.

Which is a slightly more elaborate outcome than I expected from wondering why nobody was booking our apartment in February.