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Ask HN: Review RentPost.com

rentpost.com

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Re: Ask HN: Review RentPost.com

#151

Post by khafra »

DanBlake wrote: post #107
ryanwaggoner wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not trying to attack you personally, but your response is typical of the real estate industry, and exactly why there's a hole in the market worth billions. For whatever reason, customer service is almost uniformly bad in the real estate industry. It's so bad, people don't even realize how bad it is, because they've never had anything else to choose from. For example, this kind of attitude makes me really sad: I t…

How did you come off saying that our customer service is bad? Thats a pretty big jump without knowing me or our business. Dont assume that because we dont want to induce more work orders / complaints that we have bad service. What you are saying is "bad" is akin to me asking why sites dont have a "Dissatisfied? Click here for a refund" button on every page. Providing absolute ultimate customer service will cause you…

Dan, all of your comments in this thread seem to assume that if you can't hear a customer's complaint it's not a real complaint; and, more importantly, that if you can hear a customer's complaint you have to fix it.

Just like any business, you have to set boundaries on how much you will do for free. But why not set those boundaries intelligently, based on how the customer's actual desires match up with your ability to provide services?

Re: Ask HN: Review RentPost.com

#152

Post by jacquesm »

ululululu wrote: post #143
DanBlake wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you come off saying that our customer service is bad? Thats a pretty big jump without knowing me or our business. Dont assume that because we dont want to induce more work orders / complaints that we have bad service. What you are saying is "bad" is akin to me asking why sites dont have a "Dissatisfied? Click here for a refund" button on every page. Providing absolute ultimate customer service will cause you…

slumlord

Fourth time I've flagged a comment on HN iirc.

Congratulations. Calling someone a slumlord just because they own property and are willing to discuss their business online does not give you the right to slander them.

Re: Ask HN: Review RentPost.com

#153

Post by kin »

So since you're way ahead of the game. I would like to suggest this. The ideas behind rentpost.com have been on my mind for a few years now. I've never done anything to pursue it so congrats, the site looks great. Please, grow and hire people so that this saturates the market. Then, when large enough, please provide a clean interface for prospective tenants to view apartment listings. Searching for apartments have got to be one of the biggest pains to deal with. If you have a central database of awesome tech-savvy apartments with your website as a portal for great customer service, I don't see why you can't make your customers more happy by providing listings.

Re: Ask HN: Review RentPost.com

#154

Post by JacobAldridge »

oojacoboo wrote: post #124
JacobAldridge wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having worked, trained and coached property management businesses, I think much of your review is valid - especially the work order elements. It's not about (as some of the other responses say) being a crappy landlord or ignoring a small fix that turns into a ten grand piece of work - many tenants (maybe not you, dear reader, but when you have a rent roll of hundreds or thousands) do make inane requests. These aren't…

You make a good point on the work orders. You have full control over deleting, closing out, changing the priority, etc of them. Think of work orders as a support request for an online company. You get a lot of junk support requests as well, but you have to have something, and the tools to organize as needed. And this is WAY more efficient than speaking with someone over the phone or in person, or taking emails!

It would be a fine line to balance. As we know, it's a lot easier to write a super-critical anonymous comment on Yelp than to say it face-to-face. Closer together in that continuum is placing a work order online v having to make a call (or even send an email).

If it's easier, the PM will get more of them AND those extras are unlikely to be the important ones. (If your hot water system blows, you pick up the phone; if you don't like the shade of green in the living room, you send a web message.) And if you're a good manager, you still have to respond to them all.

I'm raising this as a genuine fear for a customer reviewing the product. It would be interesting to have some user stats that overcome that fear - eg, "support requests rose by 10% BUT the time taken to respond to all requests actually went down by 20%, saving managers three hours each week, AND this feature was identified by many tenants in their improved satisfaction reports."

Re: Ask HN: Review RentPost.com

#155

Post by biot »

oojacoboo wrote: post #99
ttol wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Found it confusing too. Easy fix would be to add a new row in the table with the numbers so it appears in both the table and the graphic.

We'll review this, thanks for the input!

Also check out how it looks on the iPad or simulate this by resizing your browser width so that it's at the smallest possible size without having a horizontal scrollbar. The content is right up against the browser edge with no space. You should add some padding on each side to avoid this.

Re: Ask HN: Review RentPost.com

#156

Post by Retric »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #130
DanBlake wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you come off saying that our customer service is bad? Thats a pretty big jump without knowing me or our business. Dont assume that because we dont want to induce more work orders / complaints that we have bad service. What you are saying is "bad" is akin to me asking why sites dont have a "Dissatisfied? Click here for a refund" button on every page. Providing absolute ultimate customer service will cause you…

Again, don't take it personally, but I've been doing real estate for the last six years and I've spent tons of time talking to other investors and landlords. I also still rent because the returns in SF for buying are so abysmal. So I've had plenty of exposure to the way the real estate industry works. And the customer service is almost uniformly terrible. I read your statement as saying that you didn't want to make i…

I think the secret to great customer service is to avoid the low end of the marketplace. My apartment complexes website does all of this stuff this stuff. Yet, I have submitted less than 1 work order a year for the last five years because well maintained appliances rarely break. They might charge more than the competition but vacancy rates are something like 3% for a reason.

Re: Ask HN: Review RentPost.com

#157

Post by tsktsktsk »

lrm242 wrote: post #97
oojacoboo wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also how your units end up with leaking sinks and tens of thousands of dollars in repair costs. It depends on how you want to run your business. Many companies WANT work orders, and with the system you can read over them, prioritize and determine if you need to address or dismiss. You also don't have to take the call or deal with any of that, they just come into your feed.

You're getting pretty defensive in the face of a potential customer. If I were you I'd take the opportunity to try to understand what WOULD make the OP's life easier. There is, often times, some easy ways to turn an initial detractor into a proponent. At the minimum it won't be the last time you hear feedback like this, so use it as an opportunity to understand the REASONS the OP feels the way he does. That way you c…

You're getting pretty defensive in the face of a potential customer.

He's made pretty clear that he's not a potential customer.

This product is marketed towards landlords, not slumlords.

Re: Ask HN: Review RentPost.com

#158

Post by oojacoboo »

LiveTheDream wrote: post #116
DanBlake wrote: post #50

I own with my father a 30 unit building. With that, let me just address the tagline: "Connect with tenants effortlessly, automate rent with online rent collection, organize work orders, and much more!" - Connect with tenants effortlessly - Not a good thing, Usually leads to excess work orders, more "asks" and petty squabbles about this and that. - Automate rent with online rent collection - Not sure how this is going…

You have an option to allow tenants to pay rent with a credit card?!? I am shocked about two things. First, doesn't it hurt you to lose the processing fee off the top? Second, why on earth are tenants still paying with a check when they could pay with a credit card and reap insane rewards points. Getting airline miles for such a large, regular expenditure is a free flight per year (not to mention charging and paying…

Yea, the fees would either be passed to the tenant or absorbed by the manager (in order to improve their collections, better to get it with a fee than not)

Re: Ask HN: Review RentPost.com

#159

Post by mwarkentin »

axod wrote: post #109
delano wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure where DanBlake is from, but paying rent by cash/cheque is still the norm in Canada.

Do you send it through the post or drive to a office or something? I just can't see how there could possibly be a less efficient way to pay bills. I'd simply go insane if I had to remember to pay bills.

You just give a year's worth of post-dated cheques.

Re: Ask HN: Review RentPost.com

#160

Post by bryanh »

I'm currently managing approx 50 (?) units and I thought I'd drop my opinion:

Make me understand the pain I am in. Real estate is painful, but as you have undoubtedly noticed, people think the pain is a natural part of the package and they can't separate the two.

How about automatic late notices? Projected vacancy and turnover assistance? I mean, those are really painful and annoying processes (at least to me), present me with a punch-by-punch pain tour and offer the solution.

Additionally, for heaven's sake, drop the buzzwords and market talk. I feel like you designed the site first and tried to shoehorn some content in there. Property managers care little about the "cloud" or "we're easy to use!". They want to get paid on time, how are you helping them?

Best of luck! I think there is massive potential here but I tend to think you are going about it the wrong way in your presentation. As rwhitman has said, it seems like you are trying to solve tenants' problems, not the landlords'. Noble indeed, but not the best strategy.

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