It's like the same idea of Uber and Lyft. Less human involvement = better world /S.
It's interesting how everyone conveniently forgot about the medallion system Uber and Lyft disrupted.
Pre-Uber, either the driver rented the car to a middleman who rented the medallion from a rich owner, or said owner was selling and financing (most banks won't touch these medallions!) a medallion at a ridiculous interest rate to a driver that planned to use it as his retirement savings (an extremely volatile asset and not very liquid).
The more I spoke to cab drivers the more it seemed their industry was a pyramid scheme aimed at helping established rent-seeker take advantage of often poor new immigrants. Uber brought a breeze of fresh air: Someone could simply buy a car, calculate the depreciation and it's value on the market (since unlike medallions cars are relatively liquid assets!) do rideshare and calculate their profits or loss. They can get out of the game at anytime, and they know exactly how much they are going to get for the car they have should they sell it.
And I'm not even touching the usual pain points and often discriminatory practices of medallion drivers (refusing card payments, refusing rides to non-white passengers and to non-white neighborhoods...).
- 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 game. Technology made this a win-win long-term although there were already some people caught in the middle with old business models. However, that really cant be a reason for us not to move on.
On average, in certain locations. In others, not so much. And let's not forget surge pricing. Or people living, or wanting to get to a place, along low-profit routes. Or people with disabilities.
> more predictable with pricing
Depends. Regular taxis tended to cost a bit more, but had much lower variance.
> Uber drivers make more money today than taxi drivers used to/or do today.
That seems implausible at best.
> There are also way more job openings in this than there used to be
These aren't jobs, though. They're gigs. And highly unpredictable ones, wrt. your take-home pay.
> The world is not a zero sum game. Technology made this a win-win long-term
Absolutely true.
The problem isn't technology, it's businesses - particularly businesses that purposefully play a negative-sum game, where the losing side is society at large. Externalizing risk, costs, performing regulatory arbitrage. Making owners much better off, customers a bit better off, at the cost of making everyone else slightly worse off. And much like with greenhouse emissions - a bit here, a bit there, barely measurable puff, up until it adds up to a global crisis - these companies are killing civilized society, one VC-subsidized shiny app at a time.
I'm happy the services exist but they are not cheap, at least not here.
What we have is slightly higher pay until your car breaks. No retirement plan.
The drivers lose out.
The customer rides in someone's personal car pays a little less sometimes but a lot more (demand pricing) when they really need it.
Uber/Lift lose money on each ride but will rise prices as soon as they can once you have fewer choices.
Zero sum indeed..
Hmmm, That must depend on the market as it's not necessarily the case based on discussions I had with both in Ottawa.
(note, when Uber first started, that was the perceived story - almost "free money!" for bored white collar workers with a car and few hours to spare here and there. I've had people in $50k, $60k cars drive me around, to "meet new people and have fun". However, once full-time professionals joined the ranks, and did math on maintenance and insurance and fuel etc, the story RAPIDLY changed).
They have also become very unreliable, with no available drivers in some areas or 40+ minute wait times, and then the driver cancels. The majority of drivers switched to food delivery it seems. Pre-pandemic you could get a driver within 5 minutes no problem in some areas, and now may be waiting 30+ minutes.
I took a trip to Asheville and Uber/Lyft service was virtually non-existent, you had to rely on local cab companies to get around.
Due to a decade of massive losses. This isn’t their real long term cost. It is a scam to make people think it’s cheaper and run normal taxis out of business
Their full impact is not yet decided
Technological progress disrupts markets.
The only thing that changes are the cast of winners and losers.
Society sometimes prefers the greater good (fairness) by reigning in the powerful.
No it's no longer cheaper "to get a ride to an airport/bar than it was before." Especially if one considers "before" being before the pandemic. This increased price of Uber/Lyft has actually been quite a common news story of late[1][2][3]. Incidentally "why is uber so expensive right now 2021" on Google search has over 15 million results.
What evidence is there that an Uber is safer than a taxi? Also how can a model with surge pricing be more predictable than a taxi which has regulated rates per mile and per minute?
>"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."
Do you have a citation for Uber drivers making more money than taxis drivers? What is the true earning per mile for an Uber/Lyft driver when you factor in auto insurance, maintenance, repairs and vehicle depreciation?
The "friction" to becoming a taxi driver is pretty minimal. One just needs obtain a hack license the requirements of which are pretty nominal.[4] Especially so if you don't already own a car. Uber/Lyft seem to be having great difficulty staffing up right now[5]. I'm not sure that would be the case if it really was such the great(100% win) opportunity you make it out to be.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/article/uber-lyft-surge.html
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/06/09/uber-ly...
[3] https://www.curbed.com/2021/06/uber-lyft-expensive-new-york-...
[4] https://nycitycab.com/HackLicense.aspx
[5] https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/7/22371850/uber-lyft-driver-...
This is no longer true. In my town, now that the firehose of VC subsidies has dried up, Uber costs more than taking a cab, even without surge pricing.
Is it? Or are venture capitalists just footing the bill?
Whatever model of "price" you use needs to take into account the fact that not only are Uber and Lyft lighting enormous piles of Saudi money on fire to "gain marketshare" but that the actual drivers are being paid peanuts. This isn't pure win, it's more like Nestle handing out free baby formula in Africa to destroy the "domestic market" so to speak.
edit: fb marketplace might get the brokers first, most of my friends found their places via landlords posting there
At least in California, the broker’s fee is an expense of the landlord that is not directly passed on to the tenant moving in. If the cost is passed on, it’s hidden in the cost of rent.
Also, the landlord can claw back part of the fee if the tenant moves out before one year. So, it makes more sense as a landlord expense.
Both are parasitic entities that cause more harm to end users than benefits. The problem is that they control the information flow and supported by governments, hence we cannot eliminate them completely but can try to keep them at the bay using technology we can control
It's very easy and edgy to disdain the importance and positive impact of Uber and Lyft, but the truth of the matter is that the ride share revolution already introduced collosal improvements in quality of service in entrenched markets such as the old taxicab services.
I recall a time where unscrupulous taxicab services fraudulently inflated prices and made up twist-and-turn paths to fleece customers, and we're free to act as organized crime.
With rideshare services, you get routes and estimates generated a priori and in a deterministic way, and more importantly through a really auditable service. With rideshare services, a nasty driver is no longer totally shielded from criticism or consequences. With rideshare services, quality of service became something that was important to drivers.
And we have to than the Ubers ad Lyfts of the world for that.
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.
Maybe there is value, but not 10-15%.
Maybe Caretaker isn't the perfect solution either ... but brokers definitely are not.
It's definitely an activity that should be disrupted.
The older I get, the more I prefer dealing with flesh-and-blood people rather than self-service solutions. Life is too short for dealing with systems that go out of your way to railroad you into a bad deal.
...why sarcasm?
The entire premise of technological and economic progress is outsourcing repetitive mind-numbing tasks (whether farming or showing apartments) to automation.
You're just describing regular old beneficial economic progress -- the reason why we're not all still farmers.
And if Caretaker becomes a massive success, then competitors will appear, which is the basic economic force that prevents prices from rising too far. All of which would be wonderful.
If they can cut that 15% to 1% and this field ends up being competitive then sure.
But, they're probably going for a monopoly play here.
The difference is that cab drivers provide a real and valuable service, whereas real estate agents are a glorified key safe.
Uber and Lyft are great as long as we don’t think about the drivers they’re exploiting.
For example, a new law in Germany to apply the "who hires pays" principle for brokers in the renting market basically made the renting "broker fee free" for renters. Previously, the landlords would hire a broker that needed to be paid by the renter. Why not, it doesn't cost them anything, and at least they don't need to have a contact with the potential renters. Now, that they have to pay for the brokers service themselves, it's suddenly not that valuable to them.
If you're from Germany, you have nothing to compare these people to, they run a racket that would be illegal there to begin with. They're nothing like the kind of rental agencies in Germany, they are individuals who basically figured out how to scalp entire buildings worth of apartments.
It can't be quite this simple. If your renter is paying $X to you plus $Y to your broker, then their willingness to pay for the apartment was at least $X+Y, and you're leaving at least $Y on the table. In theory there should be a lot of market pressure to shrink Y. So the question becomes, what transaction costs are getting in the way of that? Or maybe, is the $Y actually buying something that's of value to the landlord?
How can that work? Landlord (absent regulation) set the rents as high as they want/can get away with. What's the difference between 100/month rent + 50/month broker fee, and 150/month rent + "zero"/month broker fee?
"Now, I'm you're broker so if there are any problems throughout the lease, feel free to contact me. This isn't just a one time thing!"
We literally emailed/called him two weeks later and he ghosted us.
When we were moving out of our apartment when our lease was up, he was around showing another unit, introduced himself, asked us how long we lived there, etc
Previously it had seemed like nothing could get rid of them -- landlords mostly didn't care since it was mostly tenants who paid them in the end.
But COVID suddenly made everyone a bit more willing to consider other options (like virtual tours), and with some rents down landlords are perhaps a bit more willing to realize that if there's no broker's fee, tenants can pay a little more.
I'm actually really excited about this lockbox technology, I genuinely think it could be the key to "unlocking" competition again.
My only concern is that a lot of buildings don't have anything obvious in the front to lock it to, as well as plenty of buildings prohibiting tenants from storing keys in lockboxes in front, both because anyone can take a hammer to one and smash it to get the building key, and also because they don't trust it's not someone running an AirBNB.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/27/nyregion/broker-fees-real...
[2] https://www.timeout.com/newyork/news/you-will-still-have-to-...
While searching for my current apartment, I was month-to-month on my previous NYC lease and was therefore 1) not a complete noob to the city and 2) could be super picky and I kept getting the sense brokers had no patience for someone like me.
Many software companies fix the problem, disrupt rent-seekers with reduced costs, only to later become rent-seekers that have the market power to increase costs.
10 years ago I would have entertained owning rental properties. I'm so glad with todays climate I didn't go down that path!
All fees are passed on to the consumer in some way, it is either a line item or hidden
Brokers should be a niche service at best.
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.
This is why I'm worried by - no, I hate - the automation of bureaucracy, governmental and business alike. Software is giving bureaucrats the perfect escape hatch. "I'm sorry, but The System won't let me".
The System won't let a low-level clerk fix the mistake some algorithm made. You escalate to the manager, but The System won't let them do it either. If you're lucky, maybe they'll try to escalate to the main office on the other side of the country, someone there may or may not be able to fix the issue. If you're lucky. If you're not, the manager has a perfect, non-offensive way to refuse: "I'm sorry, The System won't let me".
Here on HN, we all know how The System works. A bunch of half-assed business logic, wrapped in a bloated webapp, developed by some outsourced team of code monkeys, who on their good day mostly care about playing with the newest JavaScript fad, inflicting yet another round of suffering on thousands of employees and millions of customers. One of those broken business rules blows a fuse, your debit card gets locked out, and there's nobody within 200 kilometers of you with the access rights to clear a flag. And no, the devs who maintain The System don't have them either; they're just monkeys in the outsourcing firm that was the best at underbidding on the tender.
(I'm totally not talking about my wife's bank, that managed to spontaneously block her card and on-line banking just before weekend, and took a lot of fighting to undo its own mistake.)
> Luckily my agent was able to call the new landlord, we all got on a call, my agent, my friend, me and the landlord.
That's why we need to have people in the loop. Empowered people. To fix the mistakes, file down the corner cases.
Automation of corporate bureaucracy is trying to fit everyone into well-defined and heavily optimized flows, whether it makes sense or not. If you fall off the assembly line, the gears will crush you.
Kafka would be proud. Or horrified. One of the two.
In the parent story, its in everyone's interest that the person was able to sign the agreement. Saying "the system won't let me" to screw him over makes no sense. There will always be overrides or discretion involved.
If anything an automated system would help people from getting screwed over. If you check all the system's boxes and someone still doesn't want to rent to you, maybe he's being biased based on a protected class. Without automation, someone can just make something up or just keep you in limbo or sit on your application
I've been rejected/failed/banned by an emotionless machine a handful of times, and I don't know that anything else has made me feel quite so hopeless. I like to think a similar knot in my stomach keeps me honest.
Thankfully, one of our fundamental incentives as a property management business is to get more quality tenants approved for more apartments. If there are high quality renters qualified to sign a lease and fill a vacancy, mistakenly rejecting them directly impacts a landlord's bottom line. So we're motivated beyond altruism to get this right, which is important.
Along these lines (and perhaps surprisingly, relative to the automation in the post), our income verification product is decidely not fully automated. Non-salaried income reporting can be extremely tricky, and we've run into a number of renters with reliable income on a monthly basis that doesn't fit neatly onto a bi-weekly paystub. In those circumstances, we work with them manually to sort out how we can best present it to landlords on an application.
It may not have covered this example, but it's a good reminder of the reasons why this kind of legislation exists.
https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-topic/data-protection/refo...
(edit - grammar)
Even if you don't understand or can't use (to your advantage) the rule on automated decision-making, you can still insist that data processing be "fair" - fairness is one of the fundamental rules of EU and UK data protection law, including in the current EU and UK GDPRs. Learn your rights!!
However, to get that learner's permit required her to take a couple written tests. We were told she would have to retake those tests because the software had them down as expired. Then when she went to take the test, they told her she didn't need to because she had already taken them! Our second visit they finally sorted it out but we had to wait multiple hours while they got managers involved to assist us.
There was no direct way to contact anyone on the website and the person I spoke to at the physical office told me to contact the state headquarters. After multiple calls and emails I finally got ahold of someone involved in the website... who completely blew me off.
Every year when my registration came due I'd give it a few more tries, hoping to avoid a trip to the office. Finally after almost a decade I got someone to actually fix my account. Even then they didn't admit that anything was wrong on their end, they tried to gaslight me and pretend it was working this whole time.
This was enraging and the only cost was some inconvenience. I'm terrified of this happening with a critical service.
In the US, I don't believe any credit agency has insight into my personal bank accounts re size (I think?) or when things are paid to whom they are paid or the like (pretty sure about this). they know about my debts, but unless the landlord puts me into collection, I ca't imagine a reason for my rent appearing on the report (it's been a while since I looked at one, but dont remember seeing them)
I don't think is common practise in the U.K, but I asked around and lots of people told me it is more common that the larger agencies ask for it, plus it was for an apartment in a very competitive development so I feel like it might have been a forcing function to reduce the amount of applicants but that is speculation on my part.
What's wrong here isn't the idea that "the rules" could be applied evenly to everyone (that's actually a good thing). It's this kind of incredibly narrow requirement on housing where landlords get to dig deep into your financials to the point of knowing when/how you paid for things.
That's gross, and should not be allowed. It's almost certainly a part of many people's vicious cycles into poverty. It's also, as far as I know, a really recent development and part of the general trend towards more and more invasive surveillance in daily life.
I recently wasted a good 10 minutes trying to reach a flesh-and-blood consultant of a phone company, and I actually wanted to buy stuff from them. I just needed a human to make sure it's on the record I'm requesting a non-default service (FTTH Internet with external ONT, so that I could swap a proper router in place of the piece of garbage they normally provide).
Their fancy bot actually understood what I wanted when I repeatedly said "I want to be connected with a consultant" - it kept replying, "I understand you want to talk to a consultant; before we do that, can you tell me [insert some random idiotic question]?". I almost blew a fuse there. I only persisted because for technical reasons, I couldn't go with other providers.
I really like the service provider + financial underwriting combination, where you get basically an SLA for them providing a service, where they take 100% of the risk after the fee.
The landlord just CANT terminate the lease, ever. (Unless he is going to live in the place herself or the tenant stopped paying. And even then, it takes a long time to get a tenant out.
It works just fine.
When you sign a lease agreement, you get a guarantee that your rent will not go up during the term of that agreement.
So, if you sign a lease for $1000 a month on Monday, and on Tuesday the market rent for that area spikes to $10,000 a month, you’re locked in with a lower rate.
If I were a landlord in Oregon, given the above law, I would just only rent month to month. Breaking a lease becomes easy, but you also lose the pricing guarantee.
In my country, me moving out and saying I won't continue to pay, while the contract end date is still far in the future would of course be a breach of the contract. But that doesn't mean the landlord then can let the house sit empty for the rest of the contract time and force me to cover their loss. Landlord would instead have to try and minimize their losses by finding a new tenant, and what I would owe the landlord would be their costs to do so and the time the apartment stood empty.
Edit: "mitigation of damage" might be the US term for it. From Cornell: The mitigation of damages doctrine, also known as the doctrine of avoidable consequences, prevents an injured party from recovering damages that could have been avoided through reasonable efforts. The duty to mitigate damages is most traditionally employed in the areas of tort and contract law. To me that reads like if you want to void the contract, and the landlord doesn't accept a reasonable tenant to take over, the landlord might have to carry their losses themselves. My guess (given laws about renting being very in favor of tenants) is that there most places even might be explicit laws allowing the tenant to do this.
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 existing subletter's credit, but then they probably wouldn't have gotten the sublease in the first place.
I'm not saying it's never happened, but it's going to be rare. I don't really see anything unsustainable or mispriced about this at all. There are already other companies doing it as well in NYC, e.g.:
As long as they can find tenants for at least 6/7 (~85%) of their apartments, they're breaking even. Clearly, they think that's an easy target to hit.
(Another way to think of it: one service they provide is amortization of the risk of not filling the apartment over their entire catalog of apartments.)
San Francisco law is that tenants may sublet / add roommates etc. Landlord has 14 days to object. Objection has to be for a good reason. At least that's how I've always understood it.
Can you cite the rule in San Francisco that landlords are under no obligation to allow subletting?
https://sfrb.org/topic-no-151-subletting-and-replacement-roo....
At least with the leases I've signed, if they didn't intentionally fill a vacancy with a decent candidate they would be opening themselves up to some contractual legal exposure
It's very possible that the service is priced too low in order to get traction, but there's nothing inherently unsustainable about taking on risk (with a reasonable cap no less); it just comes down to what the company's placement rate ends up being.
If someone brought me a tenant with good credit scores, income, and references, there's no way I would turn them down.
Why would they?
I'm clutching my pearls so hard after reading this, I may have uttered a "I do declare..." and wiped sweat from my brow as well. :)
this is like half of all businesses in SV
Basically one API that can open any door (smart locks, elevators, commercial buildings...etc). We're still in private beta but feel free to reach out if you're struggling with programmatic access.
tbh, it's baffling that in 2021, this problem is still so difficult to solve. As a last point, we generally recommend against key-exhange solutions. From our experience at Sonder, people forget to return the keys and it creates a lot logistical headaches. You then have to re-key the doors...etc.
https://www.igloohome.co/en-us/
I have had zero interest in using other smart locks - especially ones that require network connectivity of any sort, but this might be one that would be worth considering.
I would avoid the Schlage "Smart Deadbolt" model. At least when it comes to remote control they're pretty awful. (They're also hideous imo)
It's the most innovative approach to smart locks I have ever seen and for this one nugget along I'm very grateful for the link to the original story!
ps: your personal site is really interesting.
Their site if you didn't pick it up from the original article: https://www.igloohome.co/en-us/
There is no way the management companies know anything about noise levels or neighbors. Larger buildings tend to have reviews online but outside of that its a gamble.
They actually do, because they receive complaints from tenants. They should be required to document that information and provide it to potential renters.
Eventually it just becomes easier to just say "no felons" than to try to figure out whether this particular brand of felony is going to negatively impact you or your other residents.
On the other hand, felons have to live somewhere...
As someone who has worked on tenant screening software, landlords typically care about a criminal history involving sex offenses or drug manufacturing. In case of recidivism, the former creates liability from other tenants if issues arise during tenancy, and the latter has potential for property destruction and/or harm to neighboring units.
There are also typically time limits on how far "back" they can look, typically 5-7 years at the most.
It somehow made the phrase "Everything that can be automated is automated." less... I don't know... scary I guess. I can't put my finger on it, but giving all this up to some algorithms seems wrong/worrisome for some reason, but seeing exactly how it was done made it less so.
The author's extreme user empathy, attention to detail, and willingness to do whatever it takes to reach a standard makes this a comforting read. You know it's going to end without disappointment, because he does whatever it takes to get good results for all stakeholders.
Real estate in general is full of middlemen looking for a cut and providing little to no value. The whole industry is overdue for a shakeup.
No value seems to have been lost in going from humans to software. Yes, vacancies are up, but that is probably due to the 15-20% rent increases and general migration away from the city. I'm sure they are also saving a mint on the two fewer on-site sales FTEs. Seems like a big win for both the tenant and landlord (hopefully the savings are being split.)
EDIT: I dont think virtual showings are a replacement for a physical walk-thru. However, it is a great way to filter out obviously mismatching apartments and a way to not waste time visiting apartments way out of your requirements. For example, if I just want to see the size of closets (a big deciding factor for me), i can do that on a floorplan easily. I can easily filter out apartments w/o walk-in closets.
The virtual version of the place might not represent the actual place. There's no easy way to check noise levels, lighting, ambiance, etc. And further, it's far easier to scam people with virtual showings. I had one yesterday where they sent a matterport tour link and claimed I couldn't see the place for real because they had a son and 3 friends die from COVID so "please understand, no in person showings". After looking into details it became clear it was a scam.
Now that was about 5 years ago, so the market might have changed.
I don't feel the paperwork part of it is a huge hassle anymore, with screening services and document signing all being online now.
It's for investors with 50+ rentals where every unit is simply a number in a spreadsheet.
TBH, this would work very well as an introduction to modern tech product development for a general audience - you could pitch this to the digital edition of the Atlantic, say, and probably get it in without much editing. It helps that the domain is so broadly relatable!
* It prevents tenants who don't meet income or other requirements from even looking at the unit.
* It makes tenants liable for noting damage as soon as they view a unit to avoid it being attributed to them, a daunting task.
* And it removes a face to face interaction that forces some accountability on landlords who don't provide a clean/cared for unit.
Notably absent is a mechanism for tenants to provide feedback to landlords on the listing. The Questions feature is helpful, but not designed for concerns/praise.
I do not think face to face interactions with landlords help when the landlord knows they are providing a poorly kept property to begin with.
I’ve had a landlord that would use various manipulative techniques to get people to sign leases.
Promises of future fixes, charm, references to the difficulty of finding a place, hints toward other interest.
Landlords can not be trusted to be benevolent. They are like the pre-Uber taxi drivers.
Landlords lack accountability and provide services to people in positions of vulnerability. They take advantage of the asymmetric power differentials and do it in the name of profit.
Anything to remove this person and unify terms is advantageous.
Jerry.ai is doing this with insurance, and various startups have made attempts to do this with car dealerships. CarWoo back in the day.
Bad algorithms can be improved overnight. Greedy, careless people are here to stay.
Lease contracts in my state are pretty much entirely standardized. Pretty much every place uses the same lease that has a bunch of fill in the blanks for amounts, unit numbers, etc. There's not a lot of additional forms to be filed. When I bought a house I was happy to have a real estate agent with me as there were a lot of forms, several different 3rd parties to deal with, much more risk, and the whole process was a lot longer. Plus you pretty much need an agent to get in to the more accurate MLS listings. There would be so many homes still listed as for sale on sites like Zillow and others that were already sold while the MLS listings were usually up to date within several hours.
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.
Not saying your product has these issues, just asking if this is considered and handled or if it's all purely profit oriented.
However this platform does is make it easy to visually inspect the unit. Since these are long(er) term rentals, the whole point is that you can inspect before you lease so checking things like parking, WiFi, and air conditioning should be pretty easy.
In my country at least, the ratio of professionalism, accountability, value-added to fees/earnings is the lowest of any occupation I can think of. It would be really low-hanging fruit for tech to disrupt, but unfortunately the real estate boards recognize this, and hold the critical data with an iron fist (from what I understand).
It would probably take some serious legal battles to pry that industry open.
If I was landlord, I would definitely what to automate everything. But, this feels like it would exclude people who cannot fulfill all of the above.
"The rent of the land, therefore, considered as the price paid for the use of the land, is naturally a monopoly price. It is not at all proportioned to what the landlord may have laid out upon the improvement of the land, or to what he can afford to take; but to what the farmer can afford to give. "
"As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce."
"[the landlord leaves the worker] with the smallest share with which the tenant can content himself without being a loser, and the landlord seldom means to leave him any more."
"The landlord demands a rent even for unimproved land, and the supposed interest or profit upon the expense of improvement is generally an addition to this original rent. Those improvements, besides, are not always made by the stock of the landlord, but sometimes by that of the tenant. When the lease comes to be renewed, however, the landlord commonly demands the same augmentation of rent as if they had been all made by his own. "
"RENT, considered as the price paid for the use of land, is naturally the highest which the tenant can afford to pay in the actual circumstances. In adjusting the lease, the landlord endeavours to leave him no greater share of the produce than what is sufficient to keep up the stock"
"[Landlords] are the only one of the three orders whose revenue costs them neither labour nor care, but comes to them, as it were, of its own accord, and independent of any plan or project of their own. That indolence, which is the natural effect of the ease and security of their situation, renders them too often, not only ignorant, but incapable of that application of mind"
Their job is to unlock a door.
Why they can make a hundred thousand dollars a year is criminal.
For instance, merely putting together an offer to buy a house can be ultra complex. Once you've dealt with viewing the house and deciding to go for it, you have to deal with inspections and financing and insurance and other legal things. If there's a problem with the house, you have to know the right questions to ask and how to take the problems into account when making an offer. You have to know the local market well and what kind of offer to make or you could overpay by thousands or miss out on a dream home.
On top of that, client contracts aren't worth the paper they're printed on for a real estate agent. A real estate agent can in theory luck out showing a client one home, they love it, buy it without a hitch, and come away with thousands of dollars for a few hours of work. A real estate agent can also work with a client for weeks/months, show them dozens of houses, but then they go off and buy that exact house with another agent and lose out on the commission with basically no real recourse after investing many hours working for somebody for free. For every good financial thing that happens to an agent, they end up getting taken for a ride by others.
Disclosure: I do have my own biases here as a friend is a real estate agent and I see some of the good and bad parts of the job.
Also pretty nice that you do that, but one thing I would recommend is immediately not allow any landlords that require such evil practices and be banned from your system.
We ended up figuring it out together.
Before I get into the solution, I should explain why
these renters have such persistent trust issues.
[...]
Because messaging/applications/leasing were all
on-platform for us, we could know when a lister was
unresponsive or a lease was signed. That insight naturally
allowed us to reliably prevent stale listings. Critically,
however, new renters to our website didn't know that. And
they wouldn't believe us when we said it. We were in a bit
of a pickle.
“Hi, this unit has been rented, what exactly are you
searching for?“
They do nothing that can't be automated.
I wonder how much of this is due to the fact that a significant portion of rental situations end with a major conflict and even uneventful apartment living has some portion of minor conflict due to yearly rent increases.
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.
That's how Amazon used to do shipping - when you go to checkout, they offer you a menu of shipping speeds, you can pick the speed you want, and then the item will arrive by the time you picked.
It has nothing to do with how Amazon does shipping now. Today, Amazon offers zero choice in shipping speeds, provides an estimate of when your item will arrive, and won't honor the estimate.
Don't try to emulate Amazon's shipping "options". They couldn't offer a worse shipping experience if they wanted to.
Someone who wishes to keep their driver's license out of S3 is getting pretty short on options.
I don't like putting people out of work but that bit about replacing someone with a shell script is not entirely inaccurate at times.
"Filled N apartments" compared to what baseline? That is, what is the comparative rate of success? And what is the total transaction cost? What about the inventory that couldn't be rented? And what about all the tenants getting dissed by the algorithm (read: discriminated against, perhaps unlawfully), per a sibling comment to this one?
Then again, these are realtors, so we expect them to blow smoke up our... nevermind.
Thank goodness...and hopefully more competitors (choices) to come in the future. Good luck!
Edit: Here! https://apartment.app/s
Please keep up the good work!
And vice versa.
I applaud any service that makes former happens.