Absolutely. We organize vendors by trade category and customer contact preference on a per-property or per-portfolio level. This allows us to structure property and vendor relationships in a large number of ways that accommodates almost any customer type
I'd love to know more about these services and what specifically you find terrible about them. Our team is always focused on building a good user experience, part of which comes from learning from other services mistakes
Part of our long-term vision is to increase the number of tools we provide to our customers to help with the other tasks associated with managing a property. These tools may include tenant background checks, rental payment solutions, etc. Right now we are laser-focused on tackling property maintenance and making the most efficient processes possible. Most of our customers currently use other solutions alongside Latchel that help with tenant management and accounting.
I feel like many of our competitors focus on either a pure software or pure human operations solution to property maintenance. We approached this problem by combining the two, leveraging the strengths of both to provide a more efficient, and more scalable product. We use our technology solutions to automate the tasks that can be automated, and use a skilled operations team to either pick up where our automation hits snags (e.g. a tenant or contractor doesnt respond to an automated SMS asking for their schedule) or where their knowledge is required to make a decision that a computer may not be able to. It's hard enough to build a quality product with either solution, even harder to meld the two into an efficient engine. We believe this keeps us competitive and makes it hard to replicate our processes.
We currently service properties across the entire US. We have built Latchel to be geographically agnostic so we can service rentals in any city without having to establish a presence or build density.
As for contractors, we will work with our customer's existing contractors if they have any, and find new ones if they dont. We work with our customers to set default budget limits for individual properties or portfolios, and then seek either their approval or their owner's approval (included with Premium service) for an increased budget if we cannot find a contractor within their budget limit. This helps prevent surprise contractor invoices and keeps budgets under control.