DGS 21: TenantCloud: The Future of Property Management Software

Most property managers are DIY landlords– they have a whole other career besides renting out properties. For the DIY landlord, there can be an overwhelming amount of things to keep track of: Tenants, maintenance services, billing and accounting, and sales. How can we end the disconnect? Enter TenantCloud, a free property management software revolutionizing the way DIY landlords do business.

In this episode we’re talking with co-founder Joe Edgard about TenantCloud is going to completely disrupt the property management software world. Learn how TenantCloud works, the philosophy behind the services they offer, and why the company is one to watch in the next year!

You’ll Learn…

[2:25] Why every property manager needs TenantCloud
[4:30] How free software can be just as profitable as paid software
[6:05] Identifying (and solving) the pain points of DIY Landlords
[9:10] Syncing TenantCloud accounting with Quickbooks
[10:32] How TenantCloud plans to surpass the other property management software on the market
[16:30] Pricing and launching for enterprise and consumer customers
[19:38] What à la carte services TenantCloud offers
[24:15] How TenantCloud is an end-to-end solution for DIY landlords
[26:50] Does TenantClould make professional property managers obsolete?
[29:10] Talking about the competition: Cozy
[33:40] Beta testing and focus groups for TenantCloud

Tweetables

Resources

TenantCloud

Transcript

Jason: Welcome DoorGrowHackers to the DoorGrowShow. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors and expand your rent roll, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrowHacker.

At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to grow property management businesses and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, expand the market and help the best property managers win. If you enjoy this episode, do me a favor, open up iTunes, find the DoorGrowShow, subscribe, and then give us a real review. Thank you for helping us with that vision.

I’m your host, Property Management Growth Hacker, Jason Hull, the Founder of OpenPotion, GatherKudos, ThunderLocal, and of course, DoorGrow. Now, let’s get into the show.

This is episode number 21 of the DoorGrowShow. Today’s episode, I am talking with Joe Edgar of the TenantCloud. TenantCloud is going to be doing some really cool stuff here in the space of property management software. I really believe what we talk about in this episode is going to be disruptive and it’s gonna be a game changer in the property management software category.

The challenge right now is that a lot of property managers are frustrated. Your property management software and all the services connected to it is a walled-garden, they don’t play nice with others, they don’t have an API integration to allow you to connect to other platforms and software, they don’t allow you the freedom and control to choose different vendors and what you want for different pieces and different aspects of your business.

This is going to be disruptive and it’s going to be free, is what Joe says in this interview. That’s his plan. Listen to this episode and let us know what you think inside the DoorGrow Club. Let’s get into the show.

I’m here with Joe Edgar of TenantCloud. Joe, I’m really excited to have you on because I’ve had some clients and mentioned your software and they’re saying, “Hey, this might be something we can use in the future.” It looks like you’re doing some new stuff in the space. Tell us a little bit about TenantCloud and how this got started.

Joe: Yeah, a great question. Nice to be on, Jason. I appreciate it. It’s a fun story, I’d been in real estate a long time, I’ve also been in [inaudible [00:02:54] capital quite a bit. It’s about time the two merged in the technology front. Bringing together, in the marketplace right now, there are approximately 18 million do-it-yourself landlords, managing about 23 million single family rentals. If you have 15 million of them only have one property, 4 million have 10 or less. They’re not willing to pay $200+ a month to manage their software. The majority of them do it in a door full of receipts, an Excel Spreadsheet, or pencil and paper all of their taxes at the end of the year.

Jason: Right.

Joe: They make it look as close to last year as possible. Seeing this happening and knowing many people that do it is like, “Man, this has to be easier.” The balance of being a landlord–the landlord is really the one going after expenditures so they’re having to spend on maintenance. When you look at a rent, if it brings in let’s say $1,000 a month, a larger portion, about 60% of that is gonna go to expenses, whether it be property taxes, utilities, whatever, or screening. Helping that landlord make those expense choices is important. If we can work with vendors to then provide that we can offer to the landlord and tenants for free.

That’s really what TenantCloud is. It’s free property management software to landlords. We give tenants their own portal where a renter resume, they can find listings. Our profile, submit maintenance requests, keep track of it, history, and have all of it in one easy location and communicate.

Jason: This is fascinating because I’ve been saying for a while it is inevitable that free property management software is going to be coming out. There’s all these different software platforms out there that are really expensive, some of them really clunky, they’re cumbersome. But then you have these models that everybody loves and is familiar with like Gmail, Facebook, etc. where they’re paying nothing, but these companies are profitable, they’re making money, and there’s so much money available in property management even if the software were provided free that company could make. I just thought this is going to happen.

Now, is this ready? It sounds like the software has been focused initially on landlords, not professional property managers.

Joe: Correct, correct. Really it’s designed–and this is going to a venture capital world–you separate startups in either enterprise or consumer using Facebook, Google. These are consumer models where consumer means that we give away for free, and you try to sell those consumers things that they might want to buy. Enterprise is more where you’re paying for the software.

We have property managers that exist. Those property managers are typically managing multi-family units. Their logistics and needs are very different. Chances are the businesses that still supply them property management software will still exist very large. Those are the ig boys. It’s the smaller low hanging fruit that are the first that we go after because they don’t have a solution at all. For us to adopt, we launched our full platform just over a year ago and we now manage over 100,000 properties through TenantCloud.

Jason: Wow.

Joe: You can see where that need is quite robust. There’s a lot of it out there and we have much more to go. There’s a number of things that are to come for property managers. The first adaption is to really solve the solution that is the biggest pain point which are the do-it-yourself landlords. They’re full-time at something other than being a landlord–doctor or lawyer, new couple that’s running a rental, or maybe somebody move from other city and they just don’t wanna sell their place. How can they manage it? The tenant sends something, the fridge is broken and you’re in the middle of a meeting, I can either repair the fridge, have it fixed and replaced, or hire somebody to go out and fix it and have it all done in my accounting for me. The basis is get their accounting out of the way.

Moving on to the property manager is really where it involves multi-users, they’re engaging almost on email platform like you talked about being able to manage things like maintenance requests going through, bring it to the owner, engage all the service pros, literally track where the car is, where they are in route, calculate the best route to do five or six maintenance requests in one route for one user. All of these functions are coming and that’s where it will be very disruptive to a lot of those property management companies.

It is coming. But our first approach is the consumer model which is to offer this free service and allow a number of things to be sold inside that platform but when you purchase it, for instance we give away free applications and websites. You can post in over 30 major websites like Zillow, Trulia, someone find your rental, they can fill out your digital application that you customized. When you’re screening it or when you’re reviewing the application, you can purchase a screening right there, converts you from checker or rent and will also add in a few more. That’s the job you’re trying to complete, you want to screen and find a great tenant but you don’t wanna keep track of the receipt. You don’t wanna keep track of the transaction, that’s the pain, that’s the hard part about it.

In TenantCloud you just press a button. That’s all done for you automatically–the receipt’s stored, the invoice is stored, all of this in the backend and you just say, “Yeah, it’s a good tenant.” That’s really where the consumer is running out, it’s about finding more and more products and then adding them for those do-it-yourself landlords to really make their job easier. Hopefully we would be able to get to the point where when you do have something like a fridge broken, you can get three bits, one touch of a button you can look through options to find the best solution of who should go and fix your problem.

Jason: Your software is tackling the maintenance coordination challenge as well?

Joe: Yes. That’s the very focal point. I like to say what we’re tackling is the point of transaction. The point of transaction, even though some may not think of it that way, it is the core problem, because all of this ends up at the end of the year being a tax problem because you had to keep track of information. If we can help them start with the end problem and then go from there and solve all the solutions, then we can really make something fluid that does work for you instead of you having to do a lot of work for it.

Jason: In your system, is there a double entry accrual sort of accounting system built into this? Are they gonna need export to QuickBooks?

Joe: We are an approved QuickBooks reseller, you can download to QuickBooks. But really when it comes to properties, it’s nice because they fall back in the accounting side of what it is. QuickBooks will handle all of your accounting. But when it comes to rental properties, you’re talking about Scheduly. It is double entry accounting but it’s down to trying to fill out your Scheduly. You can take your Scheduly, run a quick report and complete all of your sections.

Imagine this, a tenant sends you a maintenance request, and let’s say it’s the fridge, they send it to you, it’s a video, it’s a picture, whatever. You find someone to fix it, you engage the service pro, you end up hiring and you pay them, and then you end up saying done. That knows exactly where to file it in your Scheduly.

Those categories are all done, but what’s next is then you can go back to the fridge, the fridge has a history of when it was last serviced. You can see their unit, find out when it was last serviced. Having all of those speak to each other in one, unified platform takes care of everything, but the core problem at the end was making sure that it was filed in your Scheduly appropriately. Scheduly is definitely different than your normal AGI which we fill out in your taxes.

Jason: My listeners are keenly interested because they’re usually using AppFolio, Propertyware, or Buildium. They’re using these platforms typically. A new entry into the space–a lot of them aren’t concerned so much about the cost, because one property for them could be anywhere from $100-$200 coming in every month, so they’re not super concerned about the software cost initially, but they’re concerned about every single property that they’re paying for with the software, it’s a chunk of change. What do you have planned on the enterprise side for these professional property managers? Will it be to the level of somebody’s software platforms?

Joe: Yeah. In fact I think we’ll be able to surpass most of the other software platforms just because we’re looking at it in a whole different aspect–that is trying to find these basic problems that they engage with instead of having a tool that you have to login to and you have to manage, the tool should manage itself.

For instance, if you’re a large property management company, let’s say you’ve been downsized, let’s say you have 20 guys who go out to your repairs. You have maybe five sales agents who are trying to find new tenants and then you have a whole accounting back end. Right now, you have a platform that totally ignores the maintenance guys. You have something that tenants can barely login to. They login and they can write a description of what they need. Then you have sales people who are totally disconnected to anything that’s actually listed online. We’ll be able to bring all of those in one platform. Literally you can hit a button and find out where are all your service they’re only using same thing, they don’t even have to hit a button when they arrive, it will tell you they have arrived. It’s [inaudible [00:12:20] engaged on when things are going to be fixed.

Then it comes down to payments. Engaging in payments is a frustration. Right now, we’re seeing a substantial amount of rents still pay in paper checks. Trying to create a platform just to take care of automatic fees, just to take care of payments collection all in the frontend and have tenants and service pros be able to engage a system that’s doing its own thinking, means it’s cutting out your work, effort, of having to answer calls from tenants. That means leads as well.

When a lead comes on, imagine you’ll be able to just hit a button and saying, “This property is now live.” Leads can now go in, schedule an appointment, and the system will automatically confirm that they’re gonna be there the day of your appointment just to make sure that no one drove out there for no good reason.

Then someone shows it, they immediately would go back in, submit an application that does everything in a hit of a button, you move them in, and soon you can even engage on an August system where the locks are automatic and you can unlock something even digitally, and even potentially, virtually showing unit from your guests instead of having to do it in a property itself. Eventually, we’ll be able to do that in TenantCloud.

Jason: Just did a really interesting interview the other day with Prempoint.

Joe: Yes, that’s exactly who we’re talking about. TenantCloud, we see ourselves as the platform, not as the end product, but really as a platform to engage multiple products. Companies like them would be able to buy their service through TenantCloud and be able to operate, engage that platform.

Jason: You’re going to have an open API?

Joe: Yes, that’s what we’re hoping to do.

Jason: Okay.

Joe: Right now, we take API, we integrate into our system for sales for consumer front, because that’s what consumer is. But once you get into enterprise, it’s really about having our API available to them to integrate how they use their system.

Jason: Cool. If somebody wants to use a certain platform for maintenance coordination or they wanna use a certain platform for tenant showing scheduling or certain platform, the goal is to have this API that allows integration between…

Joe: Exactly, exactly. Because you’ll find that everybody’s gonna bring lots of unique and wonderful quality products. The more we can allow a platform to engage all of them, then the better customized one property management company can be over the other.

Jason: Yeah. I believe integration really is the future. This really allows property managers to pick and choose the best software, and best platform, best vendors, best systems, which is a very different model than the AppFolio model which is no API.

Joe: Exactly. You can’t offer [inaudible [00:15:06] if you’re charging for software so you’re stuck. That’s where I say it’s disruptive, because here we are saying, “Take it, let’s all join together, let’s all build something amazing.” Others have to say, “Sorry, you pay us for just what we supply. That’s rule of the game.”

Jason: When you’re ready for some API people to connect to, hit me up because I know the CEOs of these companies, and I’m gonna get them to talk to you and see if we can you all working together.

Joe: Our full enterprise is supposed to be done by November of next year, so it’s about 12 months now.

Jason: Okay. Right now, you’re not ready for property managers but you’re gonna have something–the goal is to have something ready within the next year.

Joe: We have been the one that’s managing 4,000 units with us and there’s one login stuff. They love it so they do it. But I would say right now, it’s really designed for do-it-yourself landlords.

Jason: Okay. That’s definitely something to stay tuned and take a look for. I’ve been telling people this has been on the horizon for a while, because there’s just this opportunity in the space for somebody to come in and be a disruptive person and do this.

Joe: Yeah.

Jason: Everybody knows there’s lots of property management software out there but there’s few that are really doing it well, and doing it right, and even still there’s I think a lot of room for improvement as most of the property managers out there know.

The property managers out there are like under 100 doors, at least in the single family space, residential space. That generally will never get beyond that point because one of the reasons is they’re unable to really systemize their business, and they can’t really afford to hire anybody yet. Technology is really one of the key ways they can get past that hurdle on the fulfillment side which is holding them trapped at only 50-60 units.

Joe: You’re exactly right.

Jason: This will be really interesting to see if they can get software. Do you have any idea, I know it’s early, but how you’re going to price this out for the enterprise guys?

Joe: I’ll tell you our goal.

Jason: Okay.

Joe: My goal is to make it free on enterprise.

Jason: That would be pretty crazy. I mean, there’s plenty of money to be made just on ACH processing and ancillary things.

Joe: Exactly. Let me give you a little taste of just what we’re putting on consumer and how we hope to scale that into enterprise on a much better level.

Jason: Okay.

Joe: But on consumer, eventually, your tenant will be able to buy a moving van, schedule a moving van to help them move, they’ll be able to schedule, they’ll be able to get somebody to walk their dog, and sit their dog. They’ll be able to get renters insurance, the landlord insurance, they’ll be able to refinance their mortgage, they’ll be able to buy a number of products, all of them have home warranty policies, have policies all in their equipment that are being tracked, all of those will be on the consumer side.

You move that into now a property manager and think of the larger scale. If for instance there’s retail consumers that sell, let’s just take refrigerator. On the other side, there are large distributors of this equipment that sell just to exclusive property managers. They’re looking for the same thing, really it’s flipping enterprise and allowing these back end suppliers to be the groups that pay for the software. You could go into the large property management company.

Let me give a small example, there’s single family, I’m just gonna use single family. There’s a sing family company that owns close to 20,000 single family properties in this country. These have all popped out of 2008, so there’s a number of them. They need software that is customized along a local level that feeds one mother ship but the end-users are different property managers everywhere. They need something that they can have unique, but their buying power is collectively.

Jason: Right.

Joe: We can now engage companies that are willing to distribute like a Home Depot that would love to have a contract to supply a refrigerator to every single one of those units on contract on demand with a button. Home Depot will pay for that software for that customer.

Jason: You’re kind of talking about some of the big players in the property management industry like the franchises, or the big outfits that have multiple locations.

Joe: Yup. We are thinking very big when we talk about disrupting property management software.

Jason: Regarding the consumer side, do you plan to maybe have anything in place so that the consumer that is using your service can then say, “You know what, I really don’t wanna deal with any of this.” Can they then transfer their account to a professional manager or pick one?

Joe: Yes. In fact, this is where the real core of the idea came out is I work with them. We are part owners in a few property management companies. I have a number of properties in this. Where we looked out, this is about six years ago, we looked at the property management company and like, “What are your ways to expand?” You only have a lawn mowing service, you have painting crew, we have all these different crews for fixing things up we’re like, “We can expand these services.” Then we found that just those parts of the business we’re trying to go their business.

It makes you realize that do-it-yourself landlords, for some reason, will not pay for property management software, property managers. 70% of them that own it just won’t and that’s fine. But they will à la carte. That’s what I think the advancement for property managers are.

Property Managers eventually will be an offering as a service for a leaner model where if you’re like, “I like the lawn mowing service.” Or “I’m gonna be gone for the weekend. I’d like someone to be on call 24 hours for this weekend.” They’re now gonna be able to purchase things à la carte. For a property management company, one of the largest expenses is the back office. All the accounting they have to do all of this stuff. If we take that and do that for them, they can actually focus on what brings in the largest margins which are the labor services.

Jason: Yeah. Not even just the software but I know guys that are using AppFolio or some of these software platforms, and then they’re going and paying thousands of dollars a month to outsourcing companies to handle doing some of those back office stuff because the software really isn’t doing some of these pieces for them.

Joe: Yup. They won’t either. There’s very large companies, and they charge us that price, and they are the gold standard. If you’re a large apartment complex, you almost can’t sell your property until you show you’re using a certain property management software.

That is fine, it’s up for disruption, part of that is because they will not look outside, they don’t know how to integrate, they don’t know how to work within balance, they see only one vision. If you pay for our software, we’ll give it to you. If you don’t, get out.

Our software, we design it. We don’t listen to our users, we design it. I think a lot of disruptions gonna happen in system is that if we’re not open to find that everybody wants customization, if you think there’s one solution for everyone, think again. We’re a small company and we’re now in 35 different countries. This need is global.

We have people using us to manage satellites on top of buildings, we’ve got a user in Mexico managing his horses, we have storage units, campground sites, mobile home parks, so you’re finding this core issue. We have a couple of HOAs using us to self-direct their HOA. Their tenants are homeowners paying their dues and the maintenance going through.

You find this problem is widespread, it’s basic management tools. All of them are looking to have basic expenditures and need access to those markets. Those expenditures come from companies that need to be integrated in a customized environment because not everybody has the same expenditures. A homeowner versus renter are two different things. If you can’t customize, which means integration, and integration means it can’t be an exclusively built system like some of the big boys.

Jason: Yeah. Currently there’s this big disconnect, they’ve got their property management software and then they need some CRM for the sales side, those two don’t talk to each other at all, and then they need some sort of task management or project management system for their internal team and staff.

Joe: Then there’s an inspection software…

Jason: Yeah, and then some of them are using a different vendor for inspection because it’s better than the one the property management software has. I think the ability to be able to pick and choose which applications you really want to build your ultimate Voltron–I don’t know if everybody understands that reference–your ultimate system, then I think there’s a huge competitive advantage. This is really exciting.

You’ve mentioned quite a few but what are some other things that you think really will make TenantCloud then stand out from some of these big guys like AppFolio, Propertyware, and Buildium?

Joe: Right now it has been to be an end-to-end solution, end-to-end solution for the do-it-yourself landlord. I comfort my parents, we’re kind of the lifestyle entrepreneurs, they end up having a major tax issue that hit them pretty hard. I grew up pretty poor, my father was a contractor, one of 13 kids. For him to have a $120,000 tax bill was more than–he made like $30,000 a year, that’s pretty substantial. The reason he got the tax bill as he buy these houses, we’d have to fix them up but he wouldn’t keep track of any of the receipts.

Jason: Right.

Joe: He’d then sell them. IRS would say we made this huge profit but he just wouldn’t, he didn’t know all the accounting, he didn’t hire an accountant, there’s a lot of IRS code to go through to find this out. That is the core problem, I think, and it’s do-it-yourself landlords is the largest, broadest small business in the country.

Helping them is our first effort, making sure we’ve done something that is end-to-end for them. Because they need a marketing team, they need a scheduling team to manage leads, they need a scheduling team to manage maintenance request, they need inventory lists, they need equipment management for their asset in their investment, they wanna know how the investment’s performing, they need financial tools.

Most companies, there’s departments for each one of those. To bring a tool like that where someone can have a free website, hit one button, have a list everywhere in the world and find a new tenant and screen them all in one place, that is revolutionary to them, this is something that normally they’d be paying a fortune to get all these tools. They get them all at their fingertips for free is revolutionary. But it does come with educating them that these tools are out there, because many of them come looking at TenantCloud just looking for some basic features and later find out how broad and depth it is.

Jason: Yeah. I can do it to other software.

Joe: Exactly. That really is having an end-to-end solution. When you come to the table, you don’t have to think because for them, a lot of the products that we will soon sell to enterprise, they don’t have a model that sells to mom and pop. If you have one rental, their business is SaaS, you gotta pay for the subscription of which we’ll have offered in there but they just don’t have access to it. For us it’s really getting all those tools, make them very simple, intuitive to use, and do it so they can get back to their family, get back to their weekend, get back to life before they had a rental instead of spending nights and weekends having to schedule call maintenance, do all those things, accounting.

Jason: This is how property managers sell these DIY people on using their services. Do you see TenantCloud as eliminating the need for professional property managers?

Joe: Not at all.

Jason: Because probably one of the questions they’re gonna have in their mind is, “Oh, no.” You’ve heard this in real estate for a long time, eventually realtors, there’s gonna be no need, never has happened, there’s been plenty of technology, but here comes more technology and this sounds somewhat disruptive and property managers might be concerned. How would you address that concern that these people won’t need their services anymore if they have TenantCloud?

Joe: Yeah. The only disruption to them would be it will help them grow their business. If you’re a property manager, right now, there’s 70% of the do-it-yourself market that you can’t touch. They’re so fragmented, it’s actually expensive to manage, because if they have one rental, it’s a whole service you gotta do for one property, one client. They have 100 of them, you took about 100 different clients.

But if you can manage just the service side of it, so in other words you were able to find 100 clients on TenantCloud, the back end accounting was already taken care of so you don’t have to do any back office, you don’t have to have a lot of face-to-face, but you could say, “Alright, any maintenance requests will go out and we’ll do the first hour for $20, turn it on à la carte. Then you could turn–it could have been 100 people, and just say 1,000 in a region because now you have a platform like TenantCloud to manage all of that. The back-end is done by the individual.

The hardest part of maintaining a client relationship is done for you. Really what you’re talking about is somebody calls in after hours, in fact we can be an answering service. That’s something that TenantCloud is not gonna build. We are not going to become a property manager. You’re gonna see these smaller property management companies on a local level would be able to find new customers and offer a whole new type of product. Instead of saying property management software, or property management one-size-fits-all, it would be à la carte, we’ll be able to grow their business in unique ways that they never could before. I think it will actually expand the growth of property managers versus shrink it.

Jason: Alright. Some people listening to this might say there’s already other companies maybe doing what TenantCloud is doing. The first one that I hear people mention is Cozy. How does this differ from Cozy? I’m sure you’ve been aware of them. What’s your perception on that?

Joe: Oh, yeah. We know Cozy, Cozy is out at Oregon, I’m originally from Oregon, I love the space of that. It’s nice. Cozy is a different product that’s more for doing background checks. TenantCloud does not do background checks. We offer the ability for you to buy varying different background checks, but we’re giving the consumer options at transactional report. Cozy will allow you to list a property and it will go through an application to get to a screening, and now it added in some payments. But it’s not accounting software, it’s not property management software, it’s very different. Potentially, we hope that we can offer Cozy within TenantCloud.

Jason: An integration partner.

Joe: Exactly, exactly. They provide a great product. If you wanna purchase a Cozy screening, that’s great. We’re both after that do-it-yourself landlord and I think that’s where people think we’re all competitors because it’s a growing space, but really we’re all in the same effort, there’s millions of them, and only 500,000 use this technology right now. We still have another 17.5 million to educate that there’s a technology solution out there.

Jason: Yeah, there’s a huge opportunity. The rental market has been largely untapped, it seems. If you look at Australia which is far ahead, 80% of their properties are professionally managed. Part of it has been all the legislation that’s driven the need for that. But that’s coming as well here in the US. There’s already stuff coming down the pipe with HUD and other stuff. Legislation will increase, maybe with Donald Trump it’s gonna not be as quick as it would have been otherwise, who knows. But having a real estate developer in office, I think it’s eventually going to come that there’s going to be increased legislation, it’s going to increase demand.

Joe: We’re seeing it on the other end because the one thing we haven’t really talked about as far as the market is we’ve set the number at about 18 million do-it-yourself landlords but what we haven’t talked about is short-term rentals have changed this industry substantially. Every tenant is a potential landlord. Short-term rentals have just disrupted everything. You’re saying even in Austin, which is a tech-savvy city, has fallen back on short-term rentals. You’re starting to seeing a lot of that legislation coming, short-term rentals and long-term rentals will kind of merge.

Jason: We’re talking about Airbnb. But then there’s also the coastal areas and some of the resort type areas also do vacation rentals which are short-term rentals.

Joe: Exactly. That’s a VRBO or a HomeAway.

Jason: Right.

Joe: You look at the rental and it could be power linked. This is becoming a new space, companies are now marketing the conference room, you go to a city, you could rent their conference room that’s not being used for an hour. You go into a night stay like an Airbnb, you go into a weekend stay like a HomeAway, or you can go into an extended one for a couple of weeks, and then you get into long term rentals. All of those are platforms that are–especially when you touch legislation cities–are small businesses trying to grow. Rules are going to have to be written, everybody’s gonna have to come up with some fair rules. If you’re right, I think those are coming no matter what, I don’t think that Trump can stop that. Communities are going to exist, and they’re gonna have to find a way to play fair within that space.

I think it’s gonna be nice because it has to be a balance. People have to be [inaudible [00:32:38] business and not require a property manager [inaudible [00:32:42] for a number of years. It’s not as easy to manage your own property there. There’s now some pullback happening. But here, it’s kind of a mix where you can start a small business, property managers, there will be a balance, but it also will include tenants. How do tenants manage rental like a sublease, a fun space but it’s much larger than we think it is. Just in single family rentals, there are 70 million tenants.

Jason: Alright. Is there anything that we missed about TenantCloud that you think would be relevant or interesting to professional property managers?

Joe: I think that covers most of them, it’s a place to do end-to-end management for all devices, we have an app on IOS, we have an app on Android, you can use on your computer or you can take it anywhere. It’s very flexible, easy, it’s kind of working for you. The future we hope to even put in some boths where you can control TenantCloud from your texting.

Jason: I know a lot of the bigger enterprise guys, the guys that have thousands of doors, they usually like to see the little guys experiment with companies first. If you’re looking for beta testers or early adopters, how would you want these professional property managers to get in touch with you?

Joe: They seem not to have a problem with that, actually. We can say our website, we don’t publish our phone number to [inaudible [00:34:13]. The reason is we now have so many users that we have to engage [inaudible [00:34:18] customers [inaudible [00:34:20] level online because it’s free, we’re sending out hundreds of people everyday. To manage that, we said we can’t take phone calls right now. Our company was about [inaudible [00:34:32] 30 people, we just can’t, there’s not enough people to handle those phone calls. They seem to find it pretty easy to engage us, there’s email, we ask them to do that, and please supply ideas.

We have numerous property managers right now, even if they’re not actually using us, they see the vision, they are engaging us and saying, “Oh, what about this? What about this?” We build 100% on user test. We engage our users. If we fully launch anything, we go out to the users and we have at least 10 focus groups testing it to say, “What do you think about this? What about this?” They’ll all bring us different ideas.

Before we take anything live, it is never done by a bunch of computer programmers, or designers, or UX people, this is actually done by people in the field saying, “Here’s how I use it.” It really helps trying to find a product that’s useful.

The best way to engage is one, try, give it a try, and then reach out to us directly from the site and chances are they will end up talking to me. I handle most of that engagement personally, most of my time is spent talking to users to come up with experience.

Jason: Alright. Great. This has been Joe Edgar of TenantCloud. The website is tenantcloud.com.

Joe: That’s correct.

Jason: Check that out, keep your eye on TenantCloud over the next year. They should be releasing shortly something for the professional property managers that should be a disruptor in the market.

Joe: Yeah. Cool, I appreciate it. Thanks for having me, Jason.

Jason: Joe, I appreciate you coming on. It’s been really fun and let’s keep in touch.

Joe: Sounds good.