Earlier quoted context omitted.
With what?
communism
10000000 million
We replaced rental brokers with software and filled 200 vacant apartments
301–310 of 593 posts
Re: We replaced rental brokers with software and filled 200 vacant apartments
#302I recently moved house.
I was previously living with my friend, and we had an agreement I pay sometime before the end of the month. He gave me a contract and said you'll need this, just because when you go to the next place they will ask you for your previous contract. He found it online, it was boiler plate and we agreed verbally I pay him whenever during the month. We we're really good friends, and I lived there for 3 years without a single issue.
Then when I tried to rent a new place, the agent asked for lots of details, that we're then passed on to a referencing agency. I gave them all they needed. I have a maxed out credit rating on the 2 providers I can easily check in the UK. My salary was 4x the yearly rent. And the referencing company failed me.
They failed me because I didn't always pay the rent on the 20th of the month. Now granted - that is what my contract said, but it wasn't the reality of the situation.
Of course the referencing company never asked me about this and just stamped RISK on my profile. They said they couldn't override the software - which I don't believe at all.
Luckily my agent was able to call the new landlord, we all got on a call, my agent, my friend, me and the landlord.
The landlord laughed on the call and said how stupid that was, and approved my application. The call lasted 1 minute and 28 seconds.
I have a deep knot in my stomach about where all this software takes us. In the pursuit of scale, we lose all sense of nuance and humanity. I was lucky in my case, but I know others aren't. It's going to cost us dearly.
Re: We replaced rental brokers with software and filled 200 vacant apartments
#303This sounds great from a tenant's perspective, too. I can't speak for all renters, but speaking for myself, I have have been frustrated by all the little points of friction named in this article.
However, I should not have had to go to the company's webpage, find no hint of the tenant side of this transaction, get no answer from the chat box, do some google searches, end up back at the blog, and go digging through the blog in order to find apartment.app to be the other half with all the magical UI improvements described in the OP. Afterward, of course I found the link in the footer of the company's main page.
UI suggestion. Make it easier for prospective tenants (we are your product, after all) who land on the landlord side to find the renter's side, and vice versa.
IMO, there is no greater sin in business than to leave a prospect who has learned of your prodcut/service and wishes to do business with you bereft of someone who will shut up and take his money.
Re: We replaced rental brokers with software and filled 200 vacant apartments
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
We're using Smartthings, specifically the old graph API that gives somewhat easy programmatic access. Very interested in what yall are doing with Seam (we spoke for a little bit at the virtual event YC had earlier this year). With Samsung I'm always worried some new VP is going to going to get shuffled in and decide that Smartthings has had its day in the sun.
Yes I remember our convo! Also, i really don't like to be the bearer of bad news, but I was talking to their Venture team and unfortunately that ship has already sailed. They've sold the hardware business to Aeotek and are progressively scaling down the team :( Ping me at sy@getseam.com and lets see if I can get you going with some beta units.
lol, no. We're hiring as fast as we can right now for software devs: https://smartthings.pinpointhq.com/
Re: We replaced rental brokers with software and filled 200 vacant apartments
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, they are not. The consumer price depends only on supply and demand. Fees don't influence none of it, only the cost of the selling party and thus his profit.
This is correct in almost all cases (outside of highly commoditized goods) and it's crazy how people don't understand it. It's why the price of McDonalds doesn't increase when minimum wage does. McDonalds is already charging as much as they can for a Big Mac (where stores averages a 40% margin). Increasing minimum wage means that margin goes down a bit, not that prices increase. If they could increase prices they alr…
McDonalds is a bit of an outlier here; they have incredibly predictable food costs due to high levels of standardization and a worldwide inventory network. The franchisees have a certain amount of leeway on pricing, some of which is dictated at the corporate level down, but it's based on bona fide expenses.
If local regulatory conditions cause your labor cost to go up, they are absolutely allowed to (and will) raise prices to compensate.
Re: We replaced rental brokers with software and filled 200 vacant apartments
#306Using a broker to find an apartment to rent is a very alien thought to me but I guess I've only ever really rented in big apartment complexes. I would normally just browse the area I wanted to live in on Google/Bing maps, find a few places that looked interesting, see floorplans on their websites. Take the top few of those and spend a Saturday driving to each of those to check them out. I guess if I was trying to fin…
Brokers are typically hired by the landlord to find a tenant and not a tenant to find an apartment. The big apartment complexes with a company ownership rather than individual typically hires brokers too, but probably they have enough apartments to just have in-house ones and pay them themselves.
But at least in NYC those big apartment complexes are typically only at the higher end of the spectrum. You'll be using a website like StreetEasy to find listings online which often don't have the best pictures, floor plans and you will have to schedule an appointment with one such broker for a time that works best for both of you. These days its less common but pre-pandemic it was not uncommon for a tenant to have to pay 1 month rent as broker fees.
Re: We replaced rental brokers with software and filled 200 vacant apartments
#307All this doesn't mean that the software is better than any human broker but simply that those humans were way worse than whatever software has been used.
Re: We replaced rental brokers with software and filled 200 vacant apartments
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is correct in almost all cases (outside of highly commoditized goods) and it's crazy how people don't understand it. It's why the price of McDonalds doesn't increase when minimum wage does. McDonalds is already charging as much as they can for a Big Mac (where stores averages a 40% margin). Increasing minimum wage means that margin goes down a bit, not that prices increase. If they could increase prices they alr…
> This is correct in almost all cases (outside of highly commoditized goods) and it's crazy how people don't understand it. What are you on about? Of course McD will change prices relative to input expenditure. You can even see this across all the countries they serve. If there were to be a significant impact on margin, they can increase prices. All fees are passed onto customers, that’s how you calculate profit marg…
You're not really right at all. The percentage of fees that are passed on is completely dependent on elasticity.
>All fees are passed onto customers
is not even close to correct.
Re: We replaced rental brokers with software and filled 200 vacant apartments
#309Caretaker: 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 =…
Oh, Redfin eliminated brokers?
Re: We replaced rental brokers with software and filled 200 vacant apartments
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
Obviously you're not going to use it if your landlord doesn't allow subleases, and landlords are also usually pretty upfront about approval requirements for a sublease. I've never heard of a landlord not allowing a subletter to convert to a full lease upon original lease expiration. I mean, the alternative is to forego a month or two of rent while you find a new tenant. Unless there's a horrible problem with the exis…
The difference from Doorkee, or any matchmaking service, is that they do not guarantee to pay your rent for six months if a) they can't find someone within a month or b) your landlord doesn't like them. This bet is highly asymmetric - they can win 1 month fee (if you sublease tomorrow) but lose 6x that. I'm also in NYC, and wouldn't underwrite this gamble two years ago, and absolutely not today.
It doesn't seem that crazy to me. They say:
> We were able to prove that we could make the financials work so long as we were able to fill the apartment within around 45 days of taking it over.
They're prescreening apartments/leases so they're not going to take on an apartment they can't turn around in a month. And honestly, modeling NYC rental supply and demand according to a number of factors (neighborhood, price, condition, amenities, etc.) is pretty straightforward. It's a relatively liquid market.
And like I said, landlords generally have explicit rules about tenant qualifications. They're not going to reject tenants on a whim. Why would they ever say no to a qualified tenant? That's like McDonald's refusing to sell you a quarter pounder.
There's nothing about this that seems obviously unsustainable at all.