How we built self-checkout for apartment rentals
At Caretaker, my team and I have the opportunity to think through a lot of tricky automation questions. I thought it might be useful to share how we approached and successfully automated one of the more complex problems - finding a high-quality renter.
If you don't know us, our product could be described as property management automation software. I like to call us a robo-manager. Managing a rental property is a complex operation and filled with edge cases. We have to balance not only how to automate, but also what to automate and when. Each feature has to scale gracefully across thousands of properties around the country for both owners and renters. It's critical to limit complexity and set accurate expectations.
The process of finding a renter is easily the most time-consuming part of property management, in large part because of the sheer number of steps involved with processing a single potential tenant. Some parts of the process are fairly easily handled with software, and there are a lot of details, so I won't aim to be completely comprehensive. I'll dig into the most novel and effective solutions we came up with, as well as the surprisingly counterintuitive or unexpected problems we ran into along the way. I've always enjoyed reading about others' experiences bringing automation to traditionally manual processes, so hopefully this can be a similarly interesting walkthrough.
Renters would pay us to take over the remainder of their lease obligation, we'd find a new qualified tenant and get the landlord's approval for a lease transfer or sublease. If we weren't able to find a new tenant, we'd pay the rent until the end of the lease.
