This is a classic case of where the kinds of technical founders that cruise HN shouldn't be trying to invent their own thing, but rather find a boring "business" subject matter expert as a co-founder. There are lots and lots of these things, where businesspeople see a gap that can be solved by tech but don't have the skills to do it.
My advice to all the kids out of college who want to be startup founders - don't try to come up with your own idea, because you don't know enough about business or the world to get a good one (hence the plethora of cheap social knockoffs that will never go anywhere). Instead, go find some older, experienced businessperson who wants to solve a problem in a non-technical space they understand deeply, and work with them. You're much more likely to succeed that way.
So the funny thing for me is I'm the one who works in commercial real estate, know the problems deeply, and have little technical experience other than reading HN. So how do you reverse cruise HN to find the technical cofounder to build out the solutions to our RE problems?
I literally sit within a company run by excel spreadsheets, talk on a phone with brokers, manage market information via printed pdfs of comps, mark up site plans by hand and scan them, and conduct all reporting via email and word docs to multi-billion dollar pension funds.
At nearly every step of the way I see opportunities without the technical expertise to execute.
I'd suggest adding contact info to your profile and talking about your problems here. Hopefully you'll pique some interest and have some email waiting later.
Contact Info done. Sorry about missing day-one stuff.
Since ideas are a dime a dozen:
Glassdoor for Apartment Rentals: Tenants give their address and rent amount per month in exchange for access to everyone else's data. Know what other people are actually renting for, not landlord asking rates. Why is there no data on what your neighbor just signed his lease for?
Angelist for Real Estate
Imgur for Excel
Nextdoor for Office Buildings
I got loads more...got to be something worth making in there... :)
You could definitely write some blog posts about these ideas. I think it could be a great way to find technical co-founders willing to contact you about them.
Also, city tech events might be a good place.. such as startup drink and the like. Just going there and listening to ideas.. but being on the looking for opportunities. I.e. Someone is telling how his startup isn't doing that well and might be on the lockout for a new venture.
Imgur for excel doesn't mean that much to me.. What's the context, the problem, the value proposition, the channels, etc.
Would love to hear more about your other ideas and tell you about the data and insights product I'm working on for property managers and others in the rental real estate space. Email is in my profile.
I think you hit it on the head. Think what scribd and slideshare did for .docx and .pptx
I am constantly searching for datasets from Government websites, market data, etc. Wolfram alpha has the data but its not free. The federal government data is bloated and takes forever to parse. Why couldn't someone post an excel sheet of the data for everyone to use?
Cruising HN probably isn't the place to find founders, honestly. Where do you live? Is there an established startup community there? Make friends in IT, and get introductions. Go to meetups.
Meanwhile, narrow yourself down to a single problem that you think offers maximum opportunity and minimum scope and risk, something that can be tackled with a MVP (minimum viable product). Design workflows. Learn wireframing. Create a business entity. Do everything you possibly can on your own that advances the project without actually writing the code. The farther along you are and the more viable it looks, the easier it will be for you to get a coder to help you.
I've done a ton of this type of stuff for the medical and insurance industry. I'm not looking to be a technical co-founder but if you need input I could definitely tell you what you need and what to look for.
Yeah, it's the Dirty Jobs of tech, fuck what's cool, do what pays the bills.
The best part about doing what pays is that the next generation of college kids are trying to disrupt Facebook (Snapchat/IG, God I'm getting old), rather than fuck with your massively profitable app doing lead gen for mortgage origination, that no one outside of your outside sales team has ever heard of, nor do you have to deal with whether VCs like your biz plan, and you don't have to give up equity because you can actually pay your fucking employees and they don't even cost that much because what you're doing isn't exactly rocket science.
The future is not evenly distributed, drive 100 miles from the coast and it's 1979. Go inside any office park and it's 1985.
Btw, this is why I LOVE the idea of FarmLogs, those guys are going to make a killing IMHO.
Something I've said for many years, long before I decided to do my own startup... "Jobs suck. That's why they pay you. If it didn't suck, they wouldn't have to pay you." It's advice I would give the friends of my teenage children, and friends of mine in their 20s who were trying to decide what to do when they grew up (lots of them artists/creatives who were frustrated with poverty).
So if you're doing a startup, the question you need to ask yourself is "Why?". Why not just get a job? It's not hard for smart IT people to get good paying middle class work. A good place to start is Noam Wasserman's question "Rich or King?".
If your goal is to get rich, then think seriously about doing what I'm recommending here, and latching onto a solid, reliable businessperson with good ideas to disrupt an existing business.
Definitely agree, my goal is to be wealthy. eg. The rich have money, the wealthy have time.
That's basically what I'm doing in the finance space, got a domain expert on the sell side with money, I know the compliance side and how to relate to both labour and money (as well as code). Hired a designer so it doesn't look like crap and a coder so I'm not going to be stuck at the keyboard forever.
Btw, your company looks really interesting, just signed up for your list.
It'll look a lot more interesting once the next rev of the website comes out, but right now I'm deep in coding mode. :) The code is telling me a lot about the product. Looking to go into beta in late spring at this rate. Drop me an email and I'll tell you more!
First on beat's comment: In ~2001, I wrote a Palm Pilot app for real estate agents. My mom's one, and I watched what she did during the day and tried to make a simple, easy to use app that managed the entire sales process for her. <list-of-mistakes>It had a workflow for the entire sales pipeline, from prospects to closing. It kept every detail of every stage, with a field for everything, and even had a built-in mortgage calculator. I even put the majority of the stuff in a library, and made the app a thin configuration of the library's components, so that I could launch similar products to other kinds of sales agents. It had customized widgets that made great use of screen real estate.</list-of-mistakes>
Sales were terrible (total in my life was $50). I learned, too late for me to listen, that most real estate agents at the time, in my area, were over the age of 50. Many couldn't read normal-sized text on the Palm Pilot without glasses, and few were likely to spend $400 on a handheld device when they could take notes with pen and paper.
On the list of mistakes: First, clearly, I over-engineered against a very low-fidelity model. I only had one sample of data (my mom), and built too large a product against a small amount of data. Second, my data was biased, my mom didn't want to discourage me when she couldn't read the screen. I should've noticed that she had to stop and put her glasses on every time. Third, having over-engineered, I went further and tried to generalize the code to a library, even though I didn't know how applicable any of it was to even one market, much less the larger class of markets.
Second comment. On the pegged webserver that's preventing me from reading the article: First, really, just loadtest your webserver. It's not hard, try apache bench ("ab") as a starting point. Second, shut off unnecessary parts when they're being slow (like analytics), a database access for comments, etc. Load them asynchronously from JS (putting the CPU load on the client), and let the page render when you get back an error or timeout. Unless the primary content on the page is dynamic, the page should get to the client without any I/O except for the NIC.
The counterargument is that there are so many financially entrenched interests, you'll find you can't make any headway against them.
I can't count the number of tech people I've heard say they want to create a website that will get rid of the horrible broker system of renting apartments in NYC. But that requires convincing landlords to do something different, and so far they have had zero financial incentive to do so, since it's the landlord who uses the broker, but the renter who has to pay the cost of the broker.
So ten years goes by, and still you usually have to go through the ridiculous process of paying brokers.
If the renter isn't paying the broker, they can spend more on rent.
I am living in my 6th apartment in the NYC area, and my 4th in Manhattan proper, and I still haven't paid a broker. Thousands of dollars is too much to pay people for opening doors.
Handling the paperwork in a secure, regulation-friendly way would go a long way to improving the experience of purchasing property.
I was surprised that my realtor, lawyer and mortgage broker all asked me to email sensitive financial information without any encryption and believed that a signature on a piece of paper is better than the cryptographic alternatives available today (which they don't even know about).
Especially with all of the intelligence-community BS that gets involved in the process today! I was flabberghasted that my lawyers office had no idea what an encryption key is. "Oh just email those bank statements over," they'd say. "No thanks," I replied, "I'll hand them to you myself."
And what a pain in the ass. I don't get paid to courier all that paperwork around.
And they have no idea. Think your insurance information is safe? I'd be surprised. These people just email sensitive documents around in the open. It's crazy.
I initially felt the same way as you about emailing documents and stuff when buying my house; but I figured that no matter how much trouble I put myself through, it wouldn't stop those others from emailing and faxing my stuff to here, there, and yonder.
Buying and selling real estate is up there with the most miserable experiences I have dealt with as an adult. I think there is definitely a lot of room to make a lot of change, improve people's lives significantly, and make a lot of money. But I think it will be much harder than you realize. 1. Regulations: this is a HIGHLY regulated industry. Anything that is regulated doesn't have any motivation to improve, because the regulations artificially keep their margins high. 2. Entrenched parties: Improving the technology behind real estate transactions will but lots of people out of work. Lots of people who will likely find it difficult to match their current salaries in other industries. These people will fight against your technology like Luddites.
I wish you all the best and please for the love of God make this work!!!
regulation can be a pain as you say -- there are a lot of highly regulated components of real estate, but some of them are pretty easy to get into as well. For example, crafting rental property management software like maintenance ticketing systems.
Some interesting companies in the residential home sales game are trying to streamline the process. Off the top of my head, paperless pipeline & dotloop are both trying to reduce the paper volume.
there was also a brandery.org (cincy incubator) company in the last cycle that was doing something similar.
I recently bought a house using RedFin. They had tech for pretty much every step of the way. The whole process was fairly painless actually. Now the loan process is a different story, but that wasn't terrible to. Just a lot of paper work.
I worked for a small real estate company for a couple years, developing a software solution for them.
The biggest problem is that real estate is very "exception-based". I.e. There are no "absolute" rules. Every rule you can think of will have an exception somewhere that you have to account for. Some of these exceptions may even contradict each other. 99% of properties will follow any given rule, but 1% of properties will not.
In some respects, this is why Excel is perfect for real estate. You can pick a specific row, and adjust that row for that specific property's exceptions without altering the other deals above and below.
Personally, having moved twice so far in the crazy, corrupt rental market of Manhattan, I've been dying for someone to solve this problem. For those who aren't familiar with renting an apartment in NYC, the turnover is so fast and vacancy so low, that you can only start looking for apartments the month before you want to move.
In addition, the landscape is filled with predatory brokers that add no value to the process. In some cases landlords hire them because they don't want to deal with the process themselves, and in some cases the brokers will re-list apartments they find on Craigslist or other websites to make it seem like they have an exclusive listing, then try to get you to pay their fee if you rent the apartment. In almost all cases, the renter winds up having to pay the broker fee of one month rent to as high as 15% of the annual rent. Finding a no-fee rental is extremely rare. I would love to have a transparent system that was easy enough to use for landlords/management companies that resulted in two things:
1) Owners don't feel the need to retain brokers to deal with prospective tenants, passing the ridiculously high bill onto them.
2) The market for these no-value-adding middleman brokers that re-list no-fee apartments and other brokers' listings dries up.
I believe that the only case that a renter should have to pay a broker fee is if the renter him/herself retains the broker to show them apartments because they don't want to do the work.
The situation obviously sucks for tenants, but do the owners have any incentive to invite change, given the current supply demand situation and the fact that they are able to pass on 100% of the cost to tenants?
Not now honestly, but if the system is designed to be as easy or easier than retaining a human broker, market forces should take over. I would be willing to pay a higher rent in exchange for not having to pay several thousand dollars up front in a broker fee. This becomes a win-win for both sides of the market.
Online rent payment. Rent and taxes are my only regular expenses that aren't automatically deducted from my credit card or bank account. And even the IRS accepts online (albeit manual) payments. In fact, rent is the only reason I have a paper checkbook at all.
It's an easy win on both sides. In exchange for letting me schedule automatic payments, my landlord could get much more timely payments. I think I'm reasonably responsible as folks go, but still occasionally forget to mail a check on time.
I have six rental properties as a landlord and I use Bank of America small business accounts which have an email payment system using ACH. The tenant receives an automated email invoice and can pay the invoice by ACH with a few clicks after a one-time setup. I receive an email from the bank when they have paid. It's completely paperless. No other bank was offering this at the time I set it up a few years ago. It's been working great except for the few luddite tenants who can't seem to get the simple setup to work. For them, I have them send a check to a B of A PO box and the bank processes the check for me.
The cost is $15 per month for one account, but you can add other accounts for free if you keep a min bal of $3k. And you can manage all accounts on one page of their website. It can be used by any business, including an HOA.
I use them to pay and receive rent (I'm a landlord and I rent my residence).
Additionally, whenever landlords who use Rocket Lease (my rental application company) inquire about rent payment online, I typically recommend Rent Share.
They'll even accept electronic payment from the tenant and mail a paper check to the landlord on your behalf, so if you want to have it autodrafted for your rent, you don't even require landlord opt in.
My landlord uses PayLease. It lets me setup autopay and stuff. $2 per payment, not too bad. Just low enough where I use it instead of mailing a check.
If you use a credit card you pay something just over 1% of the payment, which almost cancels out sorta if you have a 1% cash back credit card.
Rent payment companies are a dime a dozen. The problem is no one wants to pay to process a rent payment (landlord or renter) and renters appreciate the control they have in writing a check each month.
Plus, your bank probably offers free bill payment. Have you checked that out?
I've talked to a few startups doing interesting things like loading building designs into 3D game engines and letting real estate agents meet and talk with potential investors/buyers in the space itself. This sort of thing normally gets done by phone, Skype, pre-rendered videos, or rare and difficult to arrange trips to the site or design offices. If an investor is visiting from China and only in the US for 10 days and is checking out a dozen different hotels to fund building, there just isn't much time on the trip side of things. So there's lots of room for improvement.
I think you need to think larger than real estate is only finding a place to live.
Who are the actors of this market? Tenants, property manager, property owner, super intendant, etc. What do they need to do? Pay their rent, ask for maintenance, send paperwork, track their tenants, track their expenses, etc.
Their is plenty of stuff that could be done. Now I'm pretty sure some or all of these are already addressed by some company.
1.) Kill LendingTree by creating a service that actually lives up to their slogan "When banks compete, you win". In reality, signing up with LendingTree will just get you aggressively harassed by "Boiler Room" salesmen offering terms worse than whichever bank holds your checking account.
2.) Anything to simplify / make comprehensible the mountain of paperwork that accompanies every transaction around mortgages.
3.) Online payment services for rent, HOA fees and whatnot that aren't painful to use. As a rule, the existing services for this are expensive, ugly and dangerously unreliable.
4.) Home / Apartment search that does more than just dump information on you.
The typical search offers little more than a price range and a zipcode.
I want to be able to provide your search with info about what I do for a living, how old my kids are perhaps a few things that are important to me and get recommendations that consider all of these things.
I don't need to be told about the options in the places I know about it. I need it to reveal the ones I haven't considered.
Interesting - I wonder if it's your location. I used it a few months ago (I'm in NJ) and it worked great. Price was way under TrueCar, and going into the dealer was horrible. Only downside was I had to drive an hour away to get the car but was in and out in 30 minutes.
Apartment search is, in my opinion, the hardest rental vertical to try to tackle, mostly because solutions the 2 sided market traction problem have been elusive.
It also seems to be the most common one that founders attempt.
In contrast, rent applications, management software, online rent payment portals are value providing from customer #1.
A hardware/software solution that improves the current notary journal by adding location data, biometric identification & backups. Right now, title company notaries go through multiple journals a year and journals have been lost.
I like this idea. However, the money notaries make is so low, I doubt they would purchase a dedicated device. However, if you made a touch-screen app where the client could sign it, take a picture of their ID, and the rest, you might be on to something. Build it, then get one of the notary associations to adopt it.
I think the main clients would be banks and title companies. I can see them wanting to accept documents notarized using ___ because of the security. What do you think?
They could invest in a device, but making an app for a touch screen tablet would be a good first step and it would be more accessible. You could build in good security.
Padmapper is really awesome. I think one of the reasons it were so successful was that it gave an alternate (better) UI for apartment search.
People are visual and they know maps, but seeing lists is harder to parse.
The fact that nobody else at that time had put apartment search on a map is a great example of how low the bar is for excellence in this space (no offense, @padmapper).
>The fact that nobody else at that time had put apartment search on a map is a great example of how low the bar is for excellence in this space (no offense, @padmapper).
I'm pretty sure that housingmaps did it earlier. However, padmapper provided a much nicer experience.
Very true, I'm currently experiencing the same problems. I am a medium size landlord in NY, owning a nice mix of 1-4 family homes, a few mixed use commercial buildings, and an apartment building. I mostly buy homes, renovate, and rent out, but occasionally resell as well.
My technological needs as a landlord are completely unmet with affordable and worthwhile solutions. It is unmet to the point where in the last year I have gone so far as learn html, php, and sql, create my own website with its back end for tenant management and rental payments.
As a property manager, I would gladly partner with a vendor for property management software. But the problem is that a lot of the current worthwhile solutions as geared and priced towards larger property managers... 100+ units. But for a landlord serving around 25 families across 14 properties at the moment, there is not much out there.
This might be a more of a niche market, but there are tons of smaller-medium size landlords out there to make a real market for efficiency products.
If any developers out there are interested in a discussion, let me know.
The real reason you don't see many new flashy new trendy apps is that creating real estate related generally a hard problem to solve. Sure it's simple to create a simple accounting system that's like personal accounting solution, but when it comes to managing properties you need a lot more than that!! And even the accounting system is not that simple. You need to link the properties to buildings, tenants, manage late rents, fees, and so on. Then you also need to realize that many payments will be late. Some payments may be spread over multiple properties, such as things like computer hardware where the costs are spread over many properties. This doesn't even include security deposits which is a special class of accounting data.
Then you need some pretty extensive reporting features. You can't assume just one property owner, so you need to deal with that. Also when it comes to taxes, tenants, etc. you'll need a significant number of different reports to support this. You'll basically need a pretty extensive list of reports as a minimum.
Now we haven't even started talking about managing leases and rentals. Basically what tenants live where, which units will be vacant, which units have leases, which leases are coming due. What about security deposits (also related to accounting but a special case).
From there you need to manage tracking workorders, regular maintenance that needs to be done, and everything else that comes with managing properties. Lists of vendors, which vendors work on which properties. This can be especially tricky if for example you sometimes use say a specific plumber for some properties and another for other properties.
And of course I haven't even started to talk about managing the tenants themselves. Keeping track for example of when a tenant was given a notice, was told to turn down the music, and so on. Then you also need to track all kinds of info on the tenants, things like employers, contact numbers, references, you name it.
And then there's the tenants themselves. Not all tenants are people, some are companies. Properties are not all buildings. There are different types of tenants and properties. And the software needs to be smart enough to not only present the user with the proper screens and data (and store it all), but also have the proper interactions between these different data types. And of course be able to run reports on them. So you can't just say multiplex buildings go in one table because if you do this good luck creating a report grouped by building (single and multi) for a single property owner (as well as per unit for a building), which is something all property management companies will require as a report for their own clients.
But there's more. You need all kinds of additional functionality and integrations. For example most property owners want to integrate their systems with emails. They may want to incorporate images of the units pre and post, for legal purposes. Then what about documents such as leases and so on, you need a file management system.
And then there's all the logic and validation. It's not just foreign keys and relationship tables. Some data may be somewhat cyclical. And everything of course needs to be performant.
In all this you also have to remember that most users are not technical, so you need to anticipate this and prepare accordingly.
And we haven't even talked about security and other issues such as just plain old usability. So that also has to be taken into consideration.
Then there's whitelabelling. A property management company doesn't want records to come from the software company, it has to have their own logo/letterhead and so on.
Beyond that you'll eventually have to start dealing with large amounts of data. Most customers who use software for example will have more than a handful of tenants and buildings. Possibly hundreds. So how do you present a drop down menu to select tenants? It's easy for say under 50 tenants. But what about someone who has 200 rentals? Now what if they have 5 years of data on top of that. It could be a 1000 tenants in their database. And in case you're wondering you can't really archive data because of the nature of the beast: http://www.followsteph.com/2009/02/09/sometimes-simple-thing... So for us that meant we had to create special custom drop down menus that have custom sorting and coloring when prsenting tenants, so that all current tenants appear at the top alphabetically before the older non-current tenants. This might seem like a small details, but what you quickly learn is that there are a LOT of them!!
Basically creating a property management software solution is a complex task, and it's not something you can just create in a weekend or month. The minimum viable product is quite large. In the years we've been in business I've seen a lot of companies come and go. Most barely last more than a year or two. There's a lot of data, situations, and features that are required to manage properties.
And that's one of the benefits of being in this less sexy industry than say social media, at least once you get your foothold. It takes at least 2-3 years to get a good product going. Also because there are so many companies that disappear quickly, many customers are only interested in purchasing from companies that have been in business for a while. Another bias in your favor.
And this is why you don't see many people from here jump into it very often. It's not something you can do as quickly or easily, there is a pretty high barrier to entry. It might seem simple, but it's not. And that's an advantage with time.
Now this isn't to say that old solutions shouldn't improve, there is room. And someone like us has definitely disrupted the industry since we started. But please realize that a LOT of time, effort, and money is spent on implementing the functionality that you can't just re-skin your app every 2-3 years because it's trendy. That's not where the value is, it's in helping people effectively manage their properties!
PS: I'll also shortly discuss why rental payments is also similar in another comment.
In any case, please feel free to ask me questions and I'll try to respond. A mini AMA if you will ;)
The most basic answer, time and effort. It takes at least a few years to get into that market. You may be able to shortcut your way by spending large amounts of money, but otherwise it's just time and effort.
A good analogy that I like to use, as imperfect as it is, is a car company. Getting your first car takes time, there's no way around this. You can't just slap together parts and expect to be a major industry competitor right away. It takes an investment of time and/or money.
You also can't slap together parts so that it looks all nice and shinny but miss many glaring functionality. Sure I can build a vehicle with an engine, but how many people will buy my nice and shinny vehicle if it doesn't include say temperature control? Or if you can't go faster than 20 mph? Or if it has no headlights? Even simple things as not having wipers can be problematic if you don't live in a desert location.
So you have to do much like Kia and Hyundai did. It takes a large effort to get going. You build a good car, sell it at an affordable price, and continue to develop it and improve it over time. There's no shortcut, you can't just build a car over a weekend or a few months. It takes some time to get going.
And of course a lot of the lessons need to be learned along the way. Until you start, you might not realize that you can't use say part x because although it's nice in a simple car, it can't handle temperatures below say 40F, which means that although it can work in California, the car is completely useless in the northern parts of the world.
In other words you have to be willing to invest time and effort. A shinny new car will only go so far if it doesn't work. New cars that are branded lemons quickly get eliminated from the market, no matter how new they are. And those cars that are really good continue to sell year after year. They do get refreshed from time to time, but you definitely don't refresh them every 2-3 years.
Hi @FollowSteph. You mention that it takes at least 2-3 years to get a good product going. Curiously, how many developers did you have for those initial 3 years?
And in terms of customer acquisition, it's the same general stuff, SEO, Adwords, etc. I would like to say there's nothing special, but a lot of it comes from trial and error over time. Knowing what works and what doesn't. What has the highest ROI, etc.
The biggest thing for us though is that word of mouth is really strong, and that's something you can't just buy through normal channels ;)
That's means building a good product, making sure it works, basically taking the time to develop your product rather than just being a checklist of half baked features that are barely working.
It also means you need good customers service. You can't just outsource it to the cheapest provider and throw it over the wall. This is a great differentiator, especially earlier on in your business lifecycle.
Thousands of startups have been saying this _exact_ same thing for 10+ years in real estate. Out of all those that tried, only two have had major success.
Why?
Entrenched interests that don't want to give up control or data for fear of being disintermediated.
Regulations and association control that makes it tough to get traction & adoption.
Real estate is like anything. The vast majority of transactions are done by a fraction of the actual base. Getting traction quickly enough is very challenging.
So while it seems like a great space, and there is tons that _should_ and _could_ be done, it's a helluva battle to get things to change.
The other big win is the amount of money in Real Estate. When most transactions have fees on the order of 6%, there's a lot of money sloshing around to pick up.
6% transaction fees you're talking about are probably in home sales. About 800B a year transacts in the US in home sales (existing home sales data: http://www.realtor.org/sites/default/files/reports/2013/emba...). In practice, that 6% number often is a bit lower for the brokers. Also, FWIW, on top of broker fees, you'll be paying attorneys, government taxes, etc.
In Chicago, to transact in and out of a house, you should expect to pay between 10 and 11% (so if you buy a house for 100k and sell it for 110k, you will break even if you're lucky).
Rent payment processing is another hard business to enter. It's not so much technically a difficult problem as a fraud problem.
The problem with online payments is chargebacks. Except now instead of say a few hundred dollars, what happens if you have a tenant that does a chargeback for half a year's worth of rent? That's a LOT of money!!
And unlike say a retail company where you can vet your own customers, you cannot vet the tenants of your customers (the property owners). Therefore if someone is renting to lower quality tenants, and there are chargebacks, what happens? Who's responsible? How long will it be before you start to have problems with the credit companies? How long before the payment processing company will require all kinds of hoops before they accept people into their systems?
You basically need to become a Paypal for online payments. And so most of your time ends up being spent dealing with fraud because the amounts are so big and as a result the impact is so large. That's the hard problem you have to resolve to stay in that business.
All the while remember that payment processing is a low margin business. You cannot charge more than 3-5% for accepting credit cards. For many property owners paying an extra 3-5% to accept rents is a non-starter. remember that real estate renting is often a business built on leverage, so when you make 5%, that's 5% of the leveraged amount and can be quite significant in comparison to your cash investment. It's a double edged sword, and getting hit with an addition 3-5% can have a significant impact.
During all this time remember that there are tenants who are actively looking for these kinds of rentals, to take advantage of this possibility. They aren't the majority, but at the same time the majority of rentals don't accept credit cards for rent payments.
What we tend to see people asking for this are trying it for the first time. Most will eventually find a way to try it, and after a short while the vast majority stop because of the above. You generally only see the bigger companies offer it over time, and that's because they are bigger and can more easily absorb the issues. Not only that but they have processes in place, have better negotiating power, and so on, so it's easier in comparison for them. But that generally means you're dealing with companies with thousands of units, and they aren't the bulk of investors and/or property management companies in the market.
It's a tough business. It's really a subset of a Paypal/Stripe type of business, but with larger amounts and biggest potentials for fraud...
I don't think many (any?) landlords accept payment by credit card. Usually these payment solutions are tied to a bank account where the rules are much different.
Some do. And we get many requests from people who want to. As such we tend to try to inform them about the potential costs and risks associated. In many cases they had no idea, so it usually ends there.
But yes some landlords do. But it rarely tends to last long. All it takes is one bad tenant to fully appreciate the potential risks you're exposed to, because remember that rent is generally applied against a mortgage.
I've noticed that most people here when thinking about real estate related business focus on finding rentals. That's because that's what renters tend to see and therefore know.
Unfortunately happens to a very saturated business. Not only that but it's extremely hard to make a profit. Who pays for the service? I've yet to see anyone but the property owner that's lasted.
But more importantly is it worth paying for? Is the website big enough to have enough people looking on it for rentals? Maybe craigslist, but what about a new website?
It's a chicken and egg problem. Until you have enough rentals no one uses your website to find rentals. So what these companies tend to do is scrape content, or load it from somewhere. But is it sustainable?
It basically falls into a winner takes all type of business. And sadly I haven't anyone get big enough to take a commanding lead, so most look like sites that were slapped together and eventually had to fall back to ads, and then have been left to slowly rot. Not all but that's the majority...
Software for estate agents needs to be become more modern though. http://nestio.com/ just rebranded themselves to do that for example.
There's a German property portal (number two in the market) which released an iPad app for estate agents. Property management, contact list, calendar etc. Something like 50 USD/month for the app or $100/month for the hardware&app.
Website is in German, but there are screenshots and video http://immonetmanager.de/produkt/
I currently work at a Real Estate startup. It's a very interesting space with an enormous amount of opportunity for innovation including search, mortgages, notaries, inspections, document delivery/storage, legal, moving, CRM, etc.
If any ruby/rails engineers in the bay area are looking for a new gig send me an email. I'm trying to hire people!
At 200Square.co.nz we are using web tools and an enlightened approach to sales to improve the real estate sales process.
In short we sell properties, and with much lower costs than all of the old school real estate agencies.
Our key founder combines real estate and Valley backgrounds - as someone mentioned it's really important that we understand the industry we are trying to disrupt.
We have a suite of tools, focus on effective promotion techniques rather than self promoting and wildly expensive newspaper and industry glossies, and sell far more houses per agent than the norm.
We put together a site (watchmystreet.co.nz) that lets people flip the buying search process, but struggle for now accessing what should be openly available data from regional authorities.
Happy to discuss help with expansion or entry into other markets.
Ok, here's a real estate start up idea I just had. (BTW I'd actually be interested in working on this, so contact me if you're interested in joining forces.)
Use the Oculus Rift to let potential buyers and renters take a virtual tour of properties.
Think how much time is currently wasted driving between properties. And many people probably end up with non-optimal purchases since they can only reasonably visit < 10 properties.
Is there some kind of 3D scanning equipment that would let my potential startup create a virtual environment by walking through a house with it? I guess there might be a technology gap there. Anyone know?
Part of the "charm" of real estate is deceptive photos. Everyone knows they're deceptive and a halfway decent photographer with a wide-angle lens can make a 1-bd hovel look like a mansion.
When have you heard someone say "The place was so much better than the photos!"? Not often. That's a problem for a 3D experience in a few ways:
1) if the 3D experience is pitched as "more true to life", then no buyers will think that the house could be better than the experience presents.
2) if the 3D experience doesn't capture the greatness of a property, the buyer/viewer would be underwhelmed vs. seeing the place in person. Properties with spectacular views for example would take a hit because that emotional experience of "I could wake up to this every day" is replaced with a 1-dimentional texture.
3) If the 3D experience is too good, buyers will be disappointed when seeing the property in real life.
IMO sales like this -- houses, cars -- are a visceral experience that require in-person shopping. That's why internet car sales haven't really taken off. You really have to take the house for a "test drive", see how you think your furniture would fit, imagine your kids playing in the yard, all that stuff.
Now if you were making some kind of holodeck... ;)
If you're rental hunting, you might look at 10 rentals, because you probably have a fixed amount of time (the end of your current lease). If you're hunting to buy, you can take pretty much all the time in the world until you find the right thing. And it makes a lot more sense to take more time. The two bedroom apartment I had before buying a house was $2000/month, if you assume a 1 year lease, that is a $24,000 commitment. A house in the same area would be at least $500,000, you're also on the hook for taxes every year after that (which can easily be $12,000 or more on that $500,000 house).
Given the much larger commitment in terms of money and the duration, it makes sense to take longer.
The biggest mistake I think that we made while house hunting is not leaving crappy houses fast enough. Why spend 15-20 minutes looking at the rest of the house, when 2-3 is enough to tell it isn't going to be something we'll buy. We weren't interested in a fixer-upper, and from the pictures posted you can't always tell. Any Oculus Rift tour is going to have the same problems as selective picture taking.
As a buyer, first: I saw way more than 10 homes. Way more. Buying a home is a process that usually takes months. You see a lot of homes in that time (if you want to).
Second, there is just no substitute for the real thing IMO. The best you could do with a virtual tour is disqualify homes.
One of the ways I like to think about good start-up ideas is find a business stuck in the '90s and bring it to the '00s using this decade's tech that's already been invented.
For those that think real estate tech is wide open, here is a guide of 101 tech startups (and some established ones) I found in the Commercial real estate space...
I found these by browsing tags in angellist, crunchbase, and attendee and exhibitor lists of CRE tech conferences, etc...
None of this touches the internal tech many large brokerages build for their own workflows...
My papershare asks for a stupid bunch of stuff before it'll let you read anything. For twitter it demands the right to edit my profile and tweet on my behalf for example.
I would add that with tablets and smart phones, it is now possible to bring your apps on the fields. A few year ago, it was very difficult to bring your computer on a construction site.
Some startups (for instance Aproplan http://www.aproplan.com ) are already jumping on these new possibilities.
> A few year ago, it was very difficult to bring your computer on a construction site.
Pardon? Rugged computers (like business Thinkpads and Toughbooks) have existed for far more than a decade. I would more readily take such a thing to a construction site than an iDevice or an Android tablet.
Sure they have, but I imagine what the parent was referring to is the portability aspect of tablets and smart phones. Laptops are certainly easy enough to carry around, but to use them they really need to be put down somewhere. A construction site may not necessarily have an appropriate surface in an area that is convenient. A tablet is more like a clipboard that you can use as you move around the site.
Yes, of course, you could bring your computer but it is not at all the same to carry an heavy computer or to have a smart phone in your pocket. For instance, you can use your phone or your tablet all along the site during a handover to take notes and pictures. It is a lot more difficult to do that with a computer
Your point about tiny, portable cameras is well taken. OTOH, tiny point-and-shoot cameras that fit in a shirt pocket have been around for ages, and are (for the picture quality) far cheaper than a phone.
The Toughbook CF-M34 (introduced no later than 1999... [That's almost a decade and a half ago.]) weighs four pounds (only 4x heavier than a current iPad, or 2.6x heavier than a first-gen iPad) and has a hand-strap [0][1]. Frankly, I'd almost always prefer to type one-handed than to use a software keyboard. If you've work gloves on, you're going to find it really tough to use a capacitive touchscreen. And, if you work in construction, you're probably strong enough to hold a four pound device out at arms length for extended periods. :)
The innovation that modern tablets brought to the world was not to make mobile computing easy, but to make a mobile computer that's nothing but screen. I don't know your personal history, but if you're an early twenty-something, you're likely to be unaware of much of the very useful portable computing that was done and continues to be done (without modern tablets and smartphones!) by folks who do and manage physical labor for a living.
We're a new start up trying to make a difference here in Australia with real estate listings that provide ad free, clean and simple design but also build a community for discussion of the best places to live:
http://www.homely.com.au/
Couldn't agree more that innovation is coming fast to the real estate industry. Check out Rentista, an IT portal for brokers and tenants to better manage the apartment application process in NYC (particularly the document aspect)... www.rentistanyc.com
Man, thank you so much for posting this. For a while I have been pondering on a few real estate based ideas, sadly I even half-assed a mobile cms for real estate, collected prospective agents and then let it all go.
Residential real estate is decidedly unprestigious, a business that hurts people-- just look at what house prices and rents have done over the past 20 years-- and the major benefit of working in it, as the OP argues, is that it lacks hard technical problems. There will still be hard problems to solve, but they'll be people problems: dealing with incompetent but powerful management companies, blowback from very rich entrenched interests, etc.
Smart competition isn't that scary. I'd rather have smart competitors and learn a lot even if I lose, than work in a world where stupid people have all the power. If you go into the dark recesses of residential real estate, you'll find that it's not smart-people-friendly. Residential RE might be one area where average-to-stupid people have an edge, because they're closer to the animalistic instincts (i.e. the 86th floor being twice as valuable than the functionally equivalent 85th because it's "the top") that drive it.
It might be attractive to business co-founders looking to build something boring and flip it, but it's not going to get class-A technical co-founders.
This space has the lack-of-upside that would cause VCs to deride it as a "lifestyle business", but because of all the un-fun shit that humans throw up when it comes to land and housing (people get really ugly when that stuff is at stake) it wouldn't have the subjective benefits.
My advice to all the kids out of college who want to be startup founders - don't try to come up with your own idea, because you don't know enough about business or the world to get a good one (hence the plethora of cheap social knockoffs that will never go anywhere). Instead, go find some older, experienced businessperson who wants to solve a problem in a non-technical space they understand deeply, and work with them. You're much more likely to succeed that way.