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Comment by pkananen | Hacker News Reader

I hate to say it, but most of the descriptions you provide about yourself as a landlord typify why people often dislike them.

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Uh, ok. This is a product marketed to land lords, not to tenants. I am giving the opinion for the target.

Im sure the same thing could be said about attorneys. Its the way the world works. Tenants like asking for misc bullshit and landlords hate doing them.

This is also how your units end up with leaking sinks and tens of thousands of dollars in repair costs. It depends on how you want to run your business. Many companies WANT work orders, and with the system you can read over them, prioritize and determine if you need to address or dismiss. You also don't have to take the call or deal with any of that, they just come into your feed.

You're getting pretty defensive in the face of a potential customer. If I were you I'd take the opportunity to try to understand what WOULD make the OP's life easier. There is, often times, some easy ways to turn an initial detractor into a proponent. At the minimum it won't be the last time you hear feedback like this, so use it as an opportunity to understand the REASONS the OP feels the way he does. That way you can formulate a better response than, "if you don't use my product you're a shady property manager and have a crap maintenance record", because that's basically what you just said.

Here is a landlord feature:

Track the maintenance cycles associated with each apartment.

Here is a tenet feature:

Track work orders to fix a broken appliance.

They might cover the same area, but guess who is buying your product.

Good ideas.

#1 we have in place 2 similar systems to track maintenance per unit and rate your units by this number. And another report to be even more granular to the tenant level :)

#2 jiminy cricket, why didn't I think of that :P

Yea, I assume you do both of those things. My point is eating your own dogfood in this case is owning a 400 apartment complex not renting at a 400 unit complex.

Landlords care more about how much it's going to cost to service the elevator(s) vs replace them. When it's cheaper to replace a refrigerator than repair it. They don't care about how efficient the refrigerator is unless they bundle electricity cost into rent.

Tennents care about how much electricity that refrigerator costs them and how quickly they will have a working refrigerator.

Landlords don't like hearing from tennents because it's costing them money. Automated emails are great if the landlord was going to send it anyway and pointless if they don't already do it. Automated rent payments don't really help them when they can collect a late fee in a few days etc. However, automated printing of those late fees is vary helpful. :evil:

PS: Hidden fees don't just pad the bottom lines for CC companies and banks; apartment complex love that action.

Why would you not be able to say no (with appropriate reasons) to "misc bullshit" requests online via Rentpost, versus doing the same on phone/in person?

Also, wouldn't receiving payments online rather than via checks/cash be easier for you, even if you, say, disable the tenant complaints portion of the site?

PS> I am not affiliated to Rentpost in any way, just amused by your dismissing their effort in strong words.

Or, tenants like a nice place to live, and landlords don't like providing that?

Landlords love providing that. You'd be aghast how many tenants don't want it - based on the fact that once they've lived in it, it's not a nice place any more.

I had a rental house for a couple of years. I had dirt ground into the kitchen floor that took me two days to clean, I had holes punched in the walls, I had the washer stolen, I had the back door broken in when they lost the keys (despite me living five minutes away with another set of keys), I had a shed literally packed full of garbage, I had evictions that took six months (after flat-out non-payment for months before that, and partly because the sheriff "couldn't find them"), I had fleas in the carpet from a dog that was explicitly forbidden in the lease. I had one whole year where I made zero dollars due to three successive deadbeats - still had the mortgage, of course.

Rental is hell on Earth. I can't imagine doing only rental as a career. I'd end up in the loony bin or up in the bell tower taking out as many as I could before they got me.

Try being a landlord. It will make you lose all possible belief in the basic worth of humanity. You cannot imagine.

Maybe, but how does that make his critique any less valid?

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