Please review my app: RightRental.com - Carfax meets Zillow for Renters | Hacker News Reader

Please review my app: RightRental.com - Carfax meets Zillow for Renters

rightrental.com

4 pointsusiegj007 comments

Beautiful home page.

But, how are you going to fill it with content? If I do a search and don't find content, I'll permanently bounce.

Maybe you could do a double focus: +Search for reviews (de-emphasize for now) +Leave a review (increase emphasis on this)

I'd tap into the desire for people to vent. Then, overtime, with enough venting (or endorsing), you can provide the content as a value as well. But, until then, you'll be permanently losing visitors.

Also, I'd say become the go-to site for a specific geographic area. Then expand from there. If you have a thousand posts, but only 10 posts per city, there isn't a lot of value. But, if you have a thousand posts in one city, but few elsewhere -- you may just have a chance.

Design wise, seems like you know your stuff. Great colors!

I'm curious why you ask users to run Safari / Chrome and not Firefox or IE8? Are you writing your site against webkit specifically?

Other than that, it's a great looking site. However, I found myself leaving quickly since there was no data on rentals near me (or in my state, for that matter.) I suspect this will be your biggest challenge moving forward.

We built the product from idea to implementation in 2 weeks. We decided on using CSS3 techniques liberally and rather than work on downgrading for different browsers, we spent the time making a better experience for the most compliant browsers. It is in our plans to have a downgraded experience, but thought the warning was a good apology for the time being.

Thanks for the feedback. We are in the process of expanding our data. You could have added your own information... what could we do to tempt you to?

Nice execution on the homepage. Very inviting and intuitive to run a search. I love the underlying concept.

Rental screen (ie: http://www.rightrental.com/foxford-county-mayo-connacht-irel...) could use a bit more contrast on the datasheet portion.

This looks great, but the banding and overlays on the sample property report totally threw me off for a moment - it looked like something had gone wrong. Perhaps a less visually distracting approach would work better in that area.

I also like it. Pretty. A bit busy though. Once you got the basics polished, need to get actual data in of course, the chicken/egg problem will be large (it would seem) in a site like this. Any thoughts on how you'll tackle that?

Yes. Many. :-P

The market for rental data has two big issues--the first is fragmentation--many rental listings only appear in locally traded publications (your local classified) and for only a limited time (a few weeks). The second issue is that much of the listing data is vague--"Beautiful home in Upper East Side." Which means getting detailed current and historical information is a tough problem. It's not just a tough problem for us either--it's a tough problem for Renters!

We have so many thoughts on how to bootstrap this that it's hard to start this conversation unless you're really interested in the answer. So... as a teaser, I'll tell you that we've already started a LARGE mechanical turk campaign to seed key markets. We've also started the process of importing a number of public records that don't give us rental prices directly, but will let us create a model for what the rental prices SHOULD be--given some insight we have to traditional CAP rates (what a property should rent vs its purchase price and current interest rates--to make for a good investment).

Given those approaches do you see any other opportunities for us to bootstrap?

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