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We replaced rental brokers with software and filled 200 vacant apartments

caretaker.com

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Re: We replaced rental brokers with software and filled 200 vacant apartments

#221

Post by hash872 »

TillE wrote: post #60
mushufasa wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

0 value added for the tenant, but brokers typically serve the landlord.

I don't really get where brokers fit in. Most landlords should have the time/employees to take care of such things themselves. An absentee landlord would need a whole property management service to take care of everything, not just one small part. Brokers should be a niche service at best.

Do you know how much it would cost to have an actual employee, just to show the apartments and answer questions? You're paying them hourly or salary, plus payroll tax, unemployment, all of the other added expenses that a blue state throws on top of that. Plus liability, you now have to comply with every blue state law- oops did you not give the employee their exact mandated lunch time under California's very complex, tough to parse lunch rules? Get ready for a six to seven figure fine. The employee could always invent a discrimination lawsuit, wrongful termination, claim they were injured on the job, etc.

The broker is an independent third party to whom you pay a fixed fee, and have no extra cost or regulatory liability beyond that. A no brainer

Re: We replaced rental brokers with software and filled 200 vacant apartments

#222

Post by duped »

mattzito wrote: post #191
sudopluto wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

as a student in boston where brokers take 1 month rent for doing exactly *nothing*, i welcome the idea of automating away these leaches. edit: fb marketplace might get the brokers first, most of my friends found their places via landlords posting there

Brokers taking money from renters is ridiculous and should be done away with. Landlords hiring brokers to deal with vetting and showing an apartment and all those logistics seems pretty reasonable and up to the landlord if they feel it’s worth the value.

Brokers are always taking away money from renters, in one way or another.

In other cities property managers do the same thing, but they skim off the top of the rent checks and provide more services.

But really all the middlemen in housing are awful.

Re: We replaced rental brokers with software and filled 200 vacant apartments

#223

Post by greenshackle2 »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #148
Robotbeat wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Singapore system purportedly works pretty well.

Does Singapore do anything in particular with regard to landlords?

It bars corporate landlords from 80% of the housing stock, which is public. However they can buy and rent out the other 20% much like anywhere else, I guess.

Re: We replaced rental brokers with software and filled 200 vacant apartments

#224

Post by clairity »

paxys wrote: post #115
standardUser wrote: post #108

Apartment hunting is the most inefficient "purchasing" decision I have ever had to make, and the one most likely to end up with a severely sub-optimal outcome. There's some good ideas here that would at least facilitate efficiently viewing more apartments. But there's still so much extremely basic information that potential renters either cannot get about a unit or have to jump through hoops to get. Noise issues, pes…

During my apartment search in San Francisco I found that it was basically impossible to know whether a unit was covered by rent control or not. You'd have to explicitly ask the landlord, and even then they'd be cagey about it.

you can just ask when the building was built. any building built before 1978 in LA and 1979 in SF (iirc) is rent-controlled. you can also look up the build date via parcel maps on the county assessor's website (e.g., https://portal.assessor.lacounty.gov/ ).

Re: We replaced rental brokers with software and filled 200 vacant apartments

#225

Post by tenpies »

mattzito wrote: post #191
sudopluto wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

as a student in boston where brokers take 1 month rent for doing exactly *nothing*, i welcome the idea of automating away these leaches. edit: fb marketplace might get the brokers first, most of my friends found their places via landlords posting there

Brokers taking money from renters is ridiculous and should be done away with. Landlords hiring brokers to deal with vetting and showing an apartment and all those logistics seems pretty reasonable and up to the landlord if they feel it’s worth the value.

Spoiler: the landlord is just passing that cost to the tenant.

It's like in Canada where tenants can hire a broker for "free" to find a rental. However the broker just collects 1 month rent from the landlord. Do you think the landlord just absorbs the cost? No, the quoted rent was just 8.4% higher when the broker mentioned he was a broker.

Re: We replaced rental brokers with software and filled 200 vacant apartments

#226

Post by dangerwill »

__sy__ wrote: post #136
dangerwill wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing until the battery runs out. I'm just thinking of situations like Texas, the East Coast hurricane season, the West Coast fire season, etc where power cuts can last up to a week. Or what happens when GCP/AWS/Azure have a bad day and you lose connectivity with your API servers?

yeah the battery only lasts 24 hours, though I suspect we could eventually implement a low-power mode in our firmware to stretch that quite a bit. To be honest, I'm also not sure to what extend we want to over index black-swan events [1] as part of our product roadmap. Your second point about GCP/AWS/Azure going down is really valid. When we started the company, we saw a few off-the-shelf gateways that relied on a pe…

Oh does your company only work with short term rentals (airbnb) and showings? I checked your website and came away with the impression that you might have landlords installing these units on long term rentals as well as business locations potentially. That does lower the stakes here significantly than what I was thinking.

And yeah props for that solution to intermittent connectivity issues :)

Re: We replaced rental brokers with software and filled 200 vacant apartments

#227

Post by roberttod »

boringg wrote: post #159

Caretaker: The redfin of brokers. Take all the value for themselves freeze out the brokers (who provide a service but are universally disdained). Ride that wave of positive news for a couples years. Eventually everyone will hate the fraction of the market Caretaker has as they raise prices to make investors happy and people realize there are problems. It's like the same idea of Uber and Lyft. Less human involvement =…

There are some very different dynamics though - for one, the path to profitability is a little easier and price probably won't ever need to be near where it is with brokers. Uber never actually removed the humans, but seems like they already got there with this.

Also, not likely to change the landscape in the way Uber did, the scale is so much smaller and no one is getting fooled into some gig economy loophole that exploits workers.

Will probably end up with its own problems, but can't think it's worse than some brokers having to find another job/get creative.

Re: We replaced rental brokers with software and filled 200 vacant apartments

#228

Post by boringg »

seneca wrote: post #197
boringg wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comments are the perfect example of the short term positive news wave they can generate. Thank you for validating.

> Your comments are the perfect example of the short term positive news wave they can generate. Thank you for validating. This kind of lazy snark comment degrades this community.

How does it degrade? It was exactly what I was saying happens and someone exactly said the comment. It's 100% validating.

In fact it is your lazy finger wagging comment that degrades this community.

Re: We replaced rental brokers with software and filled 200 vacant apartments

#229

Post by gfxgirl »

handmodel wrote: post #206
boringg wrote: post #159

Caretaker: The redfin of brokers. Take all the value for themselves freeze out the brokers (who provide a service but are universally disdained). Ride that wave of positive news for a couples years. Eventually everyone will hate the fraction of the market Caretaker has as they raise prices to make investors happy and people realize there are problems. It's like the same idea of Uber and Lyft. Less human involvement =…

Uber and Lyft are 100% a win though. - It is now cheaper for the average person to get a ride to an airport/bar than it was before. It is safer, more predictable with timing, and more predictable with pricing. - Uber drivers make more money today than taxi drivers used to/or do today. There are also way more job openings in this than there used to be, with less friction to get involved. The world is not a zero sum ga…

It is NOT cheaper in SF. 2 miles costs at least $20 and can be as high as $40. I don't think I've been anywhere in the world where prices are that high for taxis and there are plenty of places in the world where taxis are plentiful.

I'm happy the services exist but they are not cheap, at least not here.

Re: We replaced rental brokers with software and filled 200 vacant apartments

#230

Post by not_exactly__ »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #147
BoysenberryPi wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this not already automated? I log into my apartments tenant portal, file a maintenance request, and tomorrow there's a dude at my door to fix my stuff.

Yes, my point was that the problem of a penny pinching owner trying to skimp on maintenance will not be solved by automating the maintenance request system.

It’s also unlikely they will pay for expensive sensors unless it directly impacts them :)
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