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Comment by mrfusion | Hacker News Reader

I'd be interested in hearing concrete ideas we can do today. Apartment search just doesn't strike me as a viable new startup. Am I wrong?

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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.

/rant

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.

For what it's worth, http://rent-direct.com/ lists no-fee apartments, and will pay the broker fee if there is one for a listing.

(I don't work for them; we signed up, but ended up finding a great place through someone else.)

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.

FWIW, I recommend www.rentshare.com for this.

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.

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?

What control does a renter really have? If you don't pay your rent on time, you're going to have a bad time.

Have you thought about opening an account with a bank or credit union that will automatically cut and mail a check on your behalf?

If you haven't, you really, really, should. Finding such an institution is life changing.

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.

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.

That's interesting about the payment processing. Does BOFA charge a lot for this?

Do you think it could also work for a property management company collecting HOA fees from a few hundred homes?

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'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.

1) "Carwoo for mortgages" I like it. LendingTree is analogous to TrueCar in this situation.

Except in my experience, Carwoo doesn't work (and just ends up like what incision said for #1 above).

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.

I completely agree.

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.

Joshua,

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.

It sounds like you could figure it out by simply asking a local real estate agent what their pain points are.

Aggregation. Aggregate services. Guy who made padmapper.com just aggregated all listings from various sites.

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.

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