I found my current apartment on Craigslist through an ad my landlord put up. I had to spend hours churning through what is essentially spam: brokers listing apartment or listing that they have listings but not actually giving out much information on individual places.

Services like this one and Rentjuice are services for brokers to find landlords and property managers who want to rent their apartments. (unless I misunderstand what's going on here.) Why are these services uniting landlords with managers and not with renters? I am tired of dealing with aggressive, bullshit-talking real estate agents who make money by having what amounts to a monopoly on rental information. In my experience they've got the incentive to get me into some apartment, any apartment as quickly as possible, they need me off their list ASAP, I need to find a place I'm going to spend most of my time in for at least a year. The general inability to listen to basic requests further annoys me, an agent has 4 apartments that fit my requirements, but I get dragged into places that don't meet my price requirements before getting around to the places I might actually rent.

The situation strikes me as ludicrous and it seems startups should be actively trying to dismantle this old-school ossified way of doing things. (see: AirBnB for hotels/temporary lodging as well as that car service one whose name I don't recall.) Craigslist listings moved us a big step in the correct direction, but they're still full of spam. It seems to me that real estate agents receive a lot more money than the value they're delivering. This may not be true with house purchases which is certainly more complicated and outside my experience.

"The SaaS allows landlords to post new listings, which get distributed in real-time to the brokers they’ve selected." Why aren't these being distributed to the people who need apartments?

Edited to add: "The software also includes tools for syndicate rental listings to general listing sites like Trulia, Hotpads, Craigslist and others. "

I can't believe I missed this the first time around. Worst case scenario (which I lean toward) means the above "feature" may as well read "We're going to ruin other services by helping you to spam them more easily." Sounds like a step in the wrong direction for renters, who should be the customers at the center of all of these transactions.