Optimal Time Management for Landlords
If you’re a landlord like NowRenting’s founder Ed Giardina, you don’t have time for contact information written on restaurant napkins. You don’t have time to post a vacancy to 10 different listings sites. You have phone calls that are too important to go to voicemail while you quiz a prospect who’s not even going to end up coming to the showing. And there are a hundred other things you just don’t have time for.
Ed is a software developer as well as a landlord, and he watched as tools like Yarn and Sass helped to optimize the software development process. This was software developers using software development to optimize software development: the most natural thing in the world. Developers never stop making their own tools faster and easier to use.
He thought: why can’t a software developer use software development to optimize renting?
That’s been the mission of NowRenting since the beginning: to find the places where landlords are wasting time, and automate them wherever possible.
It started as a kind of glorified answering service — now called NowRenting Leads — that gives users a special phone number and email address for prospective tenants to contact. NowRenting handles all the messages back and forth, so that whether it’s a voicemail, text or email, it lands in one easy dashboard; it handles tenant screening, asking them the questions the landlord would be asking, and then ranking the responses; it even handles posting the vacancy to all the listings sites.
That’s where it started; but that’s not where it’s going to end.
Right away, Ed was using NowRenting for his own rental business. He believes in always being his own first customer. He saw that the more features he built into NowRenting, the less time he had to spend on his landlord tasks, as NowRenting began to pick up more and more of the slack.
It was a kind of cycle: Ed’s problems as a landlord, all the various annoyances and time-wasting obstacles, became tasks for the NowRenting team to tackle. And as more and more customers started coming on board, their problems too began to inspire new features.
At the present date, NowRenting boasts an amazingly broad feature set, covering every phase of the rental process, from listing creation and lead generation all the way through to rent payment processing and maintenance requests.
Nowadays, all of Ed’s most tiresome landlord tasks are accomplished with a tap or two on his phone; and NowRenting continues to evolve, becoming ever more efficient.
