Comment by JacobAldridge | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JacobAldridge | Hacker News Reader

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Having worked, trained and coached property management businesses, I think much of your review is valid - especially the work order elements. It's not about (as some of the other responses say) being a crappy landlord or ignoring a small fix that turns into a ten grand piece of work - many tenants (maybe not you, dear reader, but when you have a rent roll of hundreds or thousands) do make inane requests. These aren't so much maintenance things as requests - now that I've signed a lease for this cheap house, can you install air-conditioning, build a fence, and re-do the bathroom, and I'll approve a $10 rent increase at the next renewal.

Your response to other elements contacts, tasks, and automated rent collection says to me that the product isn't designed for you. When I've got a team of 4-5 property managers, 600+ properties, some on fixed leases and some on holiday letting schedules, time lost to paperwork is enormous. Actually, I've not worked with an office that hasn't had some sort of technology for contact and property data; managing work orders, automating payments, assigning tasks to other managers are all fairly common now as well (and I see other key selling points in the product, so that's not to be taken as a criticism for 2 years' work).

You make a good point on the work orders. You have full control over deleting, closing out, changing the priority, etc of them.

Think of work orders as a support request for an online company. You get a lot of junk support requests as well, but you have to have something, and the tools to organize as needed. And this is WAY more efficient than speaking with someone over the phone or in person, or taking emails!

It would be a fine line to balance. As we know, it's a lot easier to write a super-critical anonymous comment on Yelp than to say it face-to-face. Closer together in that continuum is placing a work order online v having to make a call (or even send an email).

If it's easier, the PM will get more of them AND those extras are unlikely to be the important ones. (If your hot water system blows, you pick up the phone; if you don't like the shade of green in the living room, you send a web message.) And if you're a good manager, you still have to respond to them all.

I'm raising this as a genuine fear for a customer reviewing the product. It would be interesting to have some user stats that overcome that fear - eg, "support requests rose by 10% BUT the time taken to respond to all requests actually went down by 20%, saving managers three hours each week, AND this feature was identified by many tenants in their improved satisfaction reports."

It's undoubtedly a legitimate fear. But compare this to a company like ATT for example who has way more clients than most any property mgt company. Do you think they would prefer to deal with online support requests from clients or talk to them in person at their store?

Having an in person or live conversation is almost always more costly. Yes, it likely cuts down on the number of miniscule requests that you will receive, but you are likely to get a large number of those via telephone, unless you don't offer that as well, which would be impossible for offsite property managers.

So, in short, yes, I agree with you that the number of silly requests may go up, especially initially. However, to counter this, sorting them takes all of 5 seconds a piece instead of 5 min to listen to them ramble on the phone, the benefits of online rental payments saves you time and money, and the instant organization that comes from having this all flow into one system is in our eyes, priceless.

Thanks for your valuable input!

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