Totally dumb pedantry, but:
> You will not find anything that is more user friendly, period
If you write 'period' does that mean you don't need a period? It's the only sentence in the list that doesn't end with punctuation.
Ask HN: Review RentPost.com
211–220 of 255 posts
Re: Ask HN: Review RentPost.com
#212I 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…
I see what you are saying about the use of this system; particularly in terms of complaints/work orders.
But if you could get people to use this system surely it would be easy to program (assuming such a system could be added by rentpost) responses to common questions - that surely would save time in the long run (i.e. a 2 minute call turns into 10 seconds selecting the right response).
As an ex-tennant and now a home owner I have always thought that the real estate and rental markets need a serious shake up. I realise the problems faced by people renting property in terms of fussy customers and time wasters. BUT that is a problem for "you" to fix, it shouldn't affect me (a hypothetically sensible, non-fussy, customer).
I've always thought; if the contract says I can do X, making it a bit hard to do X is just not providing the full service. Random example; when we had a minor wiring issue in one house I lived in it took about 3 days to talk to the landlord properly, and another three for someone to come and do the half hour fix.
This was for two reasons; firstly the maintenance system my landlord had was complicated and disorganised (basically, a list he gave his "guys" each day and they did as and when...). And the reason it took three days to get the problem to him was because of the soft blocks he had put between him and his tenants to discourage time wasters.
Could this solve all those problems?
Re: Ask HN: Review RentPost.com
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
Uh, ok. This is a product marketed to land lords, not to tenants. I am giving the opinion for the target. Im sure the same thing could be said about attorneys. Its the way the world works. Tenants like asking for misc bullshit and landlords hate doing them.
Or, tenants like a nice place to live, and landlords don't like providing that?
Landlords love providing that. You'd be aghast how many tenants don't want it - based on the fact that once they've lived in it, it's not a nice place any more.
I had a rental house for a couple of years. I had dirt ground into the kitchen floor that took me two days to clean, I had holes punched in the walls, I had the washer stolen, I had the back door broken in when they lost the keys (despite me living five minutes away with another set of keys), I had a shed literally packed full of garbage, I had evictions that took six months (after flat-out non-payment for months before that, and partly because the sheriff "couldn't find them"), I had fleas in the carpet from a dog that was explicitly forbidden in the lease. I had one whole year where I made zero dollars due to three successive deadbeats - still had the mortgage, of course.
Rental is hell on Earth. I can't imagine doing only rental as a career. I'd end up in the loony bin or up in the bell tower taking out as many as I could before they got me.
Re: Ask HN: Review RentPost.com
#214Congratulations on the launch. I like the look of the product and wished my landlord would use it.
Looking at the comments you may want to adjust the pitch a bit to show that it makes the day to day management of units more efficient. If your tool can identify bad tenants quickly a landlord can address them before it forces other renters to leave. Also easy reporting of problems, however minor, prevents small issues from becoming large ones. For instance a leaking tap is much less costly to repair then a tap and a water damaged ceiling and floor. Other efficiencies could be the tech itself removing the lags of phone and voice-mail communications, using template replies instead of having to write fresh emails or make long phone calls for all situations, rapid forwarding to contracted service providers for repairs, and tracking of expenses for similar items and services. One of the big complaints of property managers is that they mostly get calls for bad things or when tenants and strata owners are mad. If you could make communications more formal with a tool like this you could minimize the time managers have to sit on the phone and be yelled at which could make for a happier workforce and cut some of the BS out of the workday. Oh and look into Strata managers also
Re: Ask HN: Review RentPost.com
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Please don't take offense, but you are going to run into tenants eventually who will call you DAILY to fix things or complain. Maybe they feel the bedroom is colder today than yesterday, or they saw a spider in front of the building, or maybe they don't like the shape of the clouds overhead on Thursdays. Until you rent to enough people to start getting these renters, you've been isolated.
I stayed at a place where you could place online work orders. That was a much better interface than calling up. I did not place more work orders because of it, but I did them sooner. So, the number of days that the garbage disposal did not work or the smoke alarm battery remained dead went way down. It shouldn't be difficult to screen for spurious work orders such as "dangerous spiders".
Re: Ask HN: Review RentPost.com
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Here is a landlord feature: Track the maintenance cycles associated with each apartment. Here is a tenet feature: Track work orders to fix a broken appliance. They might cover the same area, but guess who is buying your product.
Good ideas.
#1 we have in place 2 similar systems to track maintenance per unit and rate your units by this number. And another report to be even more granular to the tenant level :)
#2 jiminy cricket, why didn't I think of that :P
Re: Ask HN: Review RentPost.com
#217oojacoboo this looks awesome man - congrats! What did you develop it with?
We use the Symfony framework and jQuery.
Re: Ask HN: Review RentPost.com
#218RentMonitor beat you to the punch. What would you say the advantages of choosing RentPost over RentMonitor are?
Good question. We are hitting 2 different markets.
Our ability to automate a lot of the managers monthly activity sets us appart. Rentmonitor currently only does 'after the fact' accounting, meaning tenants still have to bring in a check or pay an e-bill. Our system allows tenants to pay electronically through their site and submit work orders.
So the time savings w/ our software can be huge. As well as payments getting 'lost' or not recorded doesn't become an issue anymore.
Re: Ask HN: Review RentPost.com
#219Earlier 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…
This response indicates to me that you truly do not understand what it's like to manage a building with hundreds of tenants. It's not that I don't want to fix real problems (broken sink, heat, disposal, etc) but I can tell you that if have this accessible of a system its only going to make a landlords life worse. Perhaps if you had an option to send in a work-order based on a set of predetermined orders that the tena…
Question: without testing, how do you know that an automated "accessible system... its only going to make a landlords life worse" ?
Have you evidence this is true? I work with web hosting and clients can send support tickets at any time, but rarely do. They have the option of asking infinite questions such as, I made a change why did my website break, why is my site not in google for [insert impossible keyword here], I want to change the background color, why is the email from my mom spam... but it almost never happens.
Re: Ask HN: Review RentPost.com
#22037signals want their design back. Edit: Come on, the site design is a rip off of the product site of i.a. http://backpackit.com/
Heh,
I think I see what you are trying to get at. We used a very popular design philosophy right now. Same reason why all tires are round :P
http://clockspot.com/ http://www.postbox-inc.com/ http://www.skyledger.com/ http://www.kindlingapp.com/ http://www.roninapp.com/ http://www.mailchimp.com/
This is a really cool resource to see the hottest, freshest websites weekly: http://abduzeedo.com/tags/sites-week
Thanks for the input, we love to hear from both sides of the fence.