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Launch HN: Propify (YC W23) – Property Management System API Aggregator

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Re: Launch HN: Propify (YC W23) – Property Management System API Aggregator

#21

Post by kole78 »

zdms wrote: post #19

I work with multiple PMS platforms and centralizing even a simple unit price table is hellish given different PMS have different paradigms for concepts such as unit pricing. For example, Yardi (depending on the version of course) has 3 different tables for Market Price of a unit flying around in the backend, each with a slightly different definition. Another issue (for users not API creators) is the lack of universal…

Totally agree! This is part of the conversation with each of our customers. We have learned early that this is a part of the pain and we are solving it in two ways:

1. Rapidly developing a deep understanding for naming and meaning within each PMS so we can speak intelligently, and properly guide our customers to focus on the data they care about.

2. Technically, we have data transformations at a couple different layers so we can repoint data coming in to exist in customer-specific locations for their business needs.

Re: Launch HN: Propify (YC W23) – Property Management System API Aggregator

#25

Post by kole78 »

letsgetsilly wrote: post #24

It's my understanding that PropertyWare requires large licensing fees to access their API. How are these fees managed for your development/testing/production access, and how are they (or not) passed on to your customer?

Propertyware does charge an access fee, you are correct. Additionally, they offer a licensing agreement where their customers can provide API keys to consultants to help them build out their tool(s). We are one of those consultants.

As far as who assumes the access fees, they are managed strictly by our customers and we have no pass-through pricing on that side. Our pricing is solely based on our own costs, infra, value, etc. All of our customers get access to all of our integrations (current and future) as part of our standard pricing model.

Re: Launch HN: Propify (YC W23) – Property Management System API Aggregator

#28

Post by kole78 »

stevenaanen wrote: post #27

Very interesting proposition. Curious, which PMSs are you integrating with first? I'm the CTO of https://obeyo.com and integrations are a huge thing for us.

Ben said he's talking to you all next week! Looking forward to it.

Our current integrations include Yardi, RealPage, Entrata, Propertyware, Buildium, Rent Manager and Rentvine. On the roadmap are Appfolio, MRI and ResMan.

Re: Launch HN: Propify (YC W23) – Property Management System API Aggregator

#29

Post by rbaudibert »

3 questions:

1. Where are the docs for Webhooks?´

2. Is there any way to get only partial data, which was updated since the last time we hit your API? Is there a way to use a date-based cursor?

3. Is the data being saved (and duplicated) in your server, or are you simply parsing the request, converting to the PMS format, hitting their API, formatting the data, and sending it back, every time?

edit: formatting

Re: Launch HN: Propify (YC W23) – Property Management System API Aggregator

#30

Post by kole78 »

rbaudibert wrote: post #29

3 questions: 1. Where are the docs for Webhooks?´ 2. Is there any way to get only partial data, which was updated since the last time we hit your API? Is there a way to use a date-based cursor? 3. Is the data being saved (and duplicated) in your server, or are you simply parsing the request, converting to the PMS format, hitting their API, formatting the data, and sending it back, every time? edit: formatting

Thanks for the questions!

1. Docs for webhooks are located in our app (after login). But a basic outline is that you add your URL, add any custom headers you wish, get the signing key, subscribe to an event and you're off the races. Events that we currently support are Job Success, Job Failure, New Data, Diff Data. Probably the most popular event (as you have alluded to in your next question) is our Diff Data event. The payload for this event will return only the data that has changed for a particular record since the last time we received data from a PMS.

2. Currently, not via the API. We will be adding more features like this to the API in the coming weeks. For now, our customers seem to prefer the Diff Data webhook anyway.

3. We do cache the data. One of the hallmarks of PMS APIs is that they are unreliable. That being the case, all of the data served from our API is from our cache so we can pass along our uptime SLA benefits to our customers.

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