We used this pre-COVID to get out of a Brooklyn lease and had a fantastic experience (back when it was Flip Instant). Flip basically charged 1 month rent and guaranteed a fill or they'd pay the rest (6 months) of my lease. Compared to our landlord who wanted 1.75x rent, up to 2.75x rent if not filled immediately, after significant negotiation. Hiring a broker myself would have likely cost 1x rent or more anyways with all the risk on us.

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.

Would love something like this to kill (or at least severely maim) the broker industry in NYC. 0 value added at the cost of 10-15% of yearly rent.

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 = better world /S.

This was really well written, such a good read.

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.

We started Seam (YC S20) a year ago to take on the problem of programmatic access to physical spaces (apartments, single-family homes, commercial buildings...etc).

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.

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, pest issues, construction and renovation details, information about how the management company operates, light levels, info about neighbors and on and on. Ninety percent of the important information about a rental unit isn't discovered until the weeks and months after a lease has been signed, and I am desperate for someone to fix this problem.

I lived in a UDR apartment property for the past 3+ yrs. They first had 2 full-time sales persons on site. That went down to one, then to zero. Now they lease based on GOOD 3d drawings of apartments, virtual showings, and easy Docusign based lease agreements. You can check it out here: https://www.udr.com/washington-dc-apartments/arlington/cresc...

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.

I 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.

Wonderful writeup with a great balance of readability and detail. Thank you for sharing!

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!

Even though this begins with a pitch for empowering tenants, the customers are the landlords. The value for landlords comes at the expense of tenants in several ways.

* 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.

The big question in San Francisco is “what does the parking cost?” Very few complexes disclose this; you must give a human your name, number, and expected move date before they will say. It’s a scummy, car dealership-like experience. I would love for stuff like this to be online but the fact is savvy landlords with very high quality websites withhold it intentionally, in order to start a human relationship.

I’ve had this urge lately after dealing with idiotic and incompetent property rental managers to automate their entire industry away. I’m glad I’m not the only one

Some of this software is pretty terrible. I don't remember what for but the new CRM software at my apartment required that I fill some form that I couldn't find so I went down stairs to the office and the person working for the land lord didn't know either.

We ended up figuring it out together.

Landlords being able to require proof of no evictions in rent history makes sense (even though it absolutely makes life worse for people who fell on any form of hardship), but why are landlords even allowed to demand proof of no felonies?!

Glad they didn't go with virtual viewings - scam players here (UK) do that and just run away with the deposit.

The article mentions how important it is to keep availability status accurate:

  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?“

Using 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 find a place with a lot of independently owned apartment units you'd need a broker to find stuff, but really it seems like something that doesn't need a broker getting paid several hundred dollars for an evening and a day of inconvenience of shopping around. I mean, you're probably going to spend that Saturday viewing the apartments anyways, now you just have someone you're paying to join you.

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.

Any attempt to replace brokers should be celebrated. They provide literally zero value for the price they charge.

They do nothing that can't be automated.

This is a bit of a tangent, but finding reliable ratings for apartments is a complete quagmire. Many many apartments have extremely poor ratings, or boosted ratings that are not believable.

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.

This 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.

Maybe I'm old school, but I like to make sure I meet my tenants face to face during a showing before renting a property out. I guess it depends on if your tenants are all shorter term and you have high turnover.

I don't feel the paperwork part of it is a huge hassle anymore, with screening services and document signing all being online now.

Economically a great result, that is indisputable. A small "but" however, did you also improve the customer experience? I am asking as someone who has lived long term in many Airbnb and similar platforms, and almost every single on of them has problems, uses every trick not covered by terms and conditions and has an evasive and unresponsive customer service. Too many to list but I've experienced: No car parking available(were full) when advertised as "with free parking" Free wifi- but not installed Aircon- no aircon in sight(been renovated) Cameras in the flat- but "don't worry they are disabled and part of the alarm system" More such things and extremely annoying to resolve.

Not saying your product has these issues, just asking if this is considered and handled or if it's all purely profit oriented.

The blog mentions they used Charles to intercept traffic and reverse engineer the digital lock [0]. How does a tool like that decode HTTPS traffic? I thought HTTPS was encrypted end to end by the browser.

[0] https://www.charlesproxy.com/

> On search, we decided that self-tour viewings on an apartment ought to feel like 2-day shipping on a product on Amazon. Knowing that you can get a given product tomorrow or the next day vs. an alternative a week from now can drive purchasing decisions - for good reason.

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.

It's getting to be that you almost can't engage in any everyday transaction in the US over $1000 that doesn't involve showing an online-verified ID.

Someone who wishes to keep their driver's license out of S3 is getting pretty short on options.

About fifteen years ago, I set up a student rental website at the behest of the rental management. The list of things they wanted to automate, even then, was astonishing. I have seen this in other situations and it has led to a kind of maxim for me -- never underestimate the number of people who think that you can automate their jobs on their behalf and that they will still have those jobs at the end of the process.

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.

Nice (maybe) but the "filled 200 vacant apartments" is meaningless - it not outright deceptive.

"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.

I really hope software will replace realtors.

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.

Apps like this is something you planned to build but don't care for regardless of wealth potential...and you wished someone built it for you. It sucks that this took almost a decade (usually have to wait 3, 5, 10 years if you wait for someone else to build it) but glad someone decided to do it!

Thank goodness...and hopefully more competitors (choices) to come in the future. Good luck!

How will this system work for those - who do not have a smart phone, - who do not have a smart phone with Biometric identity verification, - who do not have a credit card to provide?

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.

I don’t get leases. In Europe I can get out of my apartment any time. In the US I’m stuck with my place for a year.

Where the heck is the renter facing side of this website? I'd like to be on the other end of this service (never had an agent I thought improved upon a lockbox with a key).

Edit: Here! https://apartment.app/s

I'm a huge fan of Rezi which has a very similar experience to my knowledge. They are able to reduce broker fee/rents because they can assure a reduced time where apartments are unrented.

https://www.rentrezi.com/

UX question here: I noticed on the blog's screen shots that "self checkout, but for apartments" is used. How did you come up with "self-checkout" as the action? Checkout seems so far away in time re: the process flow. What was your users' mental model?

    "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"

Realtors are truly the scum of the earth, hustle culture, gate keeping, maligned incentives for clients, lazy industry in general. Only second to tech recruiters.

Please keep up the good work!

All 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.

Serious Manna vibes: https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

It's amazing to me that 90% of UK estate agents aren't gone in favour of websites. They've held out much longer than I expected.

Woah as a former landlord, this software is awesome.

I just suggested this to my broker in Toronto yesterday. And he wants to do a startup with me on this.

Similar to www.nobroker.in (India) ?

Every time middlemen eliminated, new kitten is born!

And vice versa.

I applaud any service that makes former happens.

I really want to see the lockpicking lawyer pick that lock now, darn...

why not build software that finds quality renters and sends them better deals on apartments similar to what they are renting? people pay too much rent in tech metros.

Thank you for putting me out of work!

Now do it for real estate agents.

does the software lie about the rats? people are better at that type of soft skill.

Great writeup.

great, now replace landlords.

On a similar note, real estate agents need to be knocked down a level.

Their job is to unlock a door.

Why they can make a hundred thousand dollars a year is criminal.

Making being a landlord easier and more disconnected from people and your tenants etc for the investor class. What a great product for society and wealth inequality. Love it!!! Put an algorithm on judging if someone deserves shelter, we have never seen any problems with this in past studies!! Maybe one of the most evil things I seen on here in awhile tbh.

> Renters would pay us to take over the remainder of their lease obligation, we'd find a new qualified tenant and get the landlord's approval for a lease transfer or sublease. If we weren't able to find a new tenant, we'd pay the rent until the end of the lease.

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.