
Why Real Estate Tech Is So Attractive For Founders - ezl
http://blog.ezliu.com/why-real-estate-tech-is-so-attractive-for-founders/
======
beat
This is a _classic_ case of where the kinds of technical founders that cruise
HN shouldn't be trying to invent their own thing, but rather find a boring
"business" subject matter expert as a co-founder. There are lots and lots of
these things, where businesspeople see a gap that can be solved by tech but
don't have the skills to do it.

My advice to all the kids out of college who want to be startup founders -
don't try to come up with your own idea, because you don't know enough about
business or the world to get a good one (hence the plethora of cheap social
knockoffs that will never go anywhere). Instead, go find some older,
experienced businessperson who wants to solve a problem in a non-technical
space they understand deeply, and work with them. You're _much_ more likely to
succeed that way.

~~~
graham1776
So the funny thing for me is I'm the one who works in commercial real estate,
know the problems deeply, and have little technical experience other than
reading HN. So how do you reverse cruise HN to find the technical cofounder to
build out the solutions to our RE problems?

I literally sit within a company run by excel spreadsheets, talk on a phone
with brokers, manage market information via printed pdfs of comps, mark up
site plans by hand and scan them, and conduct all reporting via email and word
docs to multi-billion dollar pension funds.

At nearly every step of the way I see opportunities without the technical
expertise to execute.

~~~
gaustin
I'd suggest adding contact info to your profile and talking about your
problems here. Hopefully you'll pique some interest and have some email
waiting later.

~~~
graham1776
Contact Info done. Sorry about missing day-one stuff.

Since ideas are a dime a dozen: Glassdoor for Apartment Rentals: Tenants give
their address and rent amount per month in exchange for access to everyone
else's data. Know what other people are actually renting for, not landlord
asking rates. Why is there no data on what your neighbor just signed his lease
for?

Angelist for Real Estate

Imgur for Excel

Nextdoor for Office Buildings

I got loads more...got to be something worth making in there... :)

~~~
pseut
"Imgur for Excel" is the most disorienting startup summary I've ever seen. We
must use imgur differently... or Excel.

If any of your ideas would be potentially useful internally too, you might be
better off hiring people rather than finding a cofounder.

~~~
wtracy
I suspect he's after something a little like Google Docs?

Otherwise, following his description literally, he wants a web-based way to
share read-only copies of random spreadsheets.

~~~
graham1776
I think you hit it on the head. Think what scribd and slideshare did for .docx
and .pptx

I am constantly searching for datasets from Government websites, market data,
etc. Wolfram alpha has the data but its not free. The federal government data
is bloated and takes forever to parse. Why couldn't someone post an excel
sheet of the data for everyone to use?

------
crazygringo
The counterargument is that there are so many financially entrenched
interests, you'll find you can't make any headway against them.

I can't count the number of tech people I've heard say they want to create a
website that will get rid of the horrible broker system of renting apartments
in NYC. But that requires convincing _landlords_ to do something different,
and so far they have had zero financial incentive to do so, since it's the
landlord who uses the broker, but the renter who has to pay the cost of the
broker.

So ten years goes by, and still you usually have to go through the ridiculous
process of paying brokers.

~~~
robrenaud
If the renter isn't paying the broker, they can spend more on rent.

I am living in my 6th apartment in the NYC area, and my 4th in Manhattan
proper, and I still haven't paid a broker. Thousands of dollars is too much to
pay people for opening doors.

------
agentultra
Handling the paperwork in a secure, regulation-friendly way would go a long
way to improving the experience of purchasing property.

I was surprised that my realtor, lawyer and mortgage broker all asked me to
email sensitive financial information without any encryption and believed that
a signature on a piece of paper is better than the cryptographic alternatives
available today (which they don't even know about).

Especially with all of the intelligence-community BS that gets involved in the
process today! I was flabberghasted that my lawyers office had no idea what an
encryption key is. "Oh just email those bank statements over," they'd say. "No
thanks," I replied, "I'll hand them to you myself."

And what a pain in the ass. I don't get paid to courier all that paperwork
around.

And they have no idea. Think your insurance information is safe? I'd be
surprised. These people just email sensitive documents around in the open.
It's crazy.

~~~
fnordfnordfnord
I initially felt the same way as you about emailing documents and stuff when
buying my house; but I figured that no matter how much trouble I put myself
through, it wouldn't stop those others from emailing and faxing my stuff to
here, there, and yonder.

------
sputknick
Buying and selling real estate is up there with the most miserable experiences
I have dealt with as an adult. I think there is definitely a lot of room to
make a lot of change, improve people's lives significantly, and make a lot of
money. But I think it will be much harder than you realize. 1. Regulations:
this is a HIGHLY regulated industry. Anything that is regulated doesn't have
any motivation to improve, because the regulations artificially keep their
margins high. 2. Entrenched parties: Improving the technology behind real
estate transactions will but lots of people out of work. Lots of people who
will likely find it difficult to match their current salaries in other
industries. These people will fight against your technology like Luddites. I
wish you all the best and please for the love of God make this work!!!

Edit: spelling

~~~
ezl
regulation can be a pain as you say -- there are a lot of highly regulated
components of real estate, but some of them are pretty easy to get into as
well. For example, crafting rental property management software like
maintenance ticketing systems.

Some interesting companies in the residential home sales game are trying to
streamline the process. Off the top of my head, paperless pipeline & dotloop
are both trying to reduce the paper volume.

there was also a brandery.org (cincy incubator) company in the last cycle that
was doing something similar.

------
rverghes
I worked for a small real estate company for a couple years, developing a
software solution for them.

The biggest problem is that real estate is very "exception-based". I.e. There
are no "absolute" rules. Every rule you can think of will have an exception
somewhere that you have to account for. Some of these exceptions may even
contradict each other. 99% of properties will follow any given rule, but 1% of
properties will not.

In some respects, this is why Excel is perfect for real estate. You can pick a
specific row, and adjust that row for that specific property's exceptions
without altering the other deals above and below.

------
mrfusion
I'd be interested in hearing concrete ideas we can do today. Apartment search
just doesn't strike me as a viable new startup. Am I wrong?

~~~
leknarf
Online rent payment. Rent and taxes are my only regular expenses that aren't
automatically deducted from my credit card or bank account. And even the IRS
accepts online (albeit manual) payments. In fact, rent is the only reason I
have a paper checkbook at all.

It's an easy win on both sides. In exchange for letting me schedule automatic
payments, my landlord could get much more timely payments. I think I'm
reasonably responsible as folks go, but still occasionally forget to mail a
check on time.

~~~
joshuaheard
I have six rental properties as a landlord and I use Bank of America small
business accounts which have an email payment system using ACH. The tenant
receives an automated email invoice and can pay the invoice by ACH with a few
clicks after a one-time setup. I receive an email from the bank when they have
paid. It's completely paperless. No other bank was offering this at the time I
set it up a few years ago. It's been working great except for the few luddite
tenants who can't seem to get the simple setup to work. For them, I have them
send a check to a B of A PO box and the bank processes the check for me.

~~~
mrfusion
That's interesting about the payment processing. Does BOFA charge a lot for
this?

Do you think it could also work for a property management company collecting
HOA fees from a few hundred homes?

~~~
joshuaheard
The cost is $15 per month for one account, but you can add other accounts for
free if you keep a min bal of $3k. And you can manage all accounts on one page
of their website. It can be used by any business, including an HOA.

------
eff3x4
Very true, I'm currently experiencing the same problems. I am a medium size
landlord in NY, owning a nice mix of 1-4 family homes, a few mixed use
commercial buildings, and an apartment building. I mostly buy homes, renovate,
and rent out, but occasionally resell as well.

My technological needs as a landlord are completely unmet with affordable and
worthwhile solutions. It is unmet to the point where in the last year I have
gone so far as learn html, php, and sql, create my own website with its back
end for tenant management and rental payments.

As a property manager, I would gladly partner with a vendor for property
management software. But the problem is that a lot of the current worthwhile
solutions as geared and priced towards larger property managers... 100+ units.
But for a landlord serving around 25 families across 14 properties at the
moment, there is not much out there.

This might be a more of a niche market, but there are tons of smaller-medium
size landlords out there to make a real market for efficiency products.

If any developers out there are interested in a discussion, let me know.

~~~
charliecauthen
I would love to discuss your needs with you. Please let me know how I can
reach you when you have a chance.

------
FollowSteph3
Firstly I'm the founder and owner of LandlordMax Software
([http://www.LandlordMax.com](http://www.LandlordMax.com)), a property
management software company. The company has been in business for over 10
years now and has been growing quite well over the years:
[http://www.followsteph.com/2013/08/07/landlordmax-2012-2013-...](http://www.followsteph.com/2013/08/07/landlordmax-2012-2013-fiscal-
year-10-year-anniversary-and-a-10th-record-year/)

The real reason you don't see many new flashy new trendy apps is that creating
real estate related generally a hard problem to solve. Sure it's simple to
create a simple accounting system that's like personal accounting solution,
but when it comes to managing properties you need a lot more than that!! And
even the accounting system is not that simple. You need to link the properties
to buildings, tenants, manage late rents, fees, and so on. Then you also need
to realize that many payments will be late. Some payments may be spread over
multiple properties, such as things like computer hardware where the costs are
spread over many properties. This doesn't even include security deposits which
is a special class of accounting data.

Then you need some pretty extensive reporting features. You can't assume just
one property owner, so you need to deal with that. Also when it comes to
taxes, tenants, etc. you'll need a significant number of different reports to
support this. You'll basically need a pretty extensive list of reports as a
minimum.

Now we haven't even started talking about managing leases and rentals.
Basically what tenants live where, which units will be vacant, which units
have leases, which leases are coming due. What about security deposits (also
related to accounting but a special case).

From there you need to manage tracking workorders, regular maintenance that
needs to be done, and everything else that comes with managing properties.
Lists of vendors, which vendors work on which properties. This can be
especially tricky if for example you sometimes use say a specific plumber for
some properties and another for other properties.

And of course I haven't even started to talk about managing the tenants
themselves. Keeping track for example of when a tenant was given a notice, was
told to turn down the music, and so on. Then you also need to track all kinds
of info on the tenants, things like employers, contact numbers, references,
you name it.

And then there's the tenants themselves. Not all tenants are people, some are
companies. Properties are not all buildings. There are different types of
tenants and properties. And the software needs to be smart enough to not only
present the user with the proper screens and data (and store it all), but also
have the proper interactions between these different data types. And of course
be able to run reports on them. So you can't just say multiplex buildings go
in one table because if you do this good luck creating a report grouped by
building (single and multi) for a single property owner (as well as per unit
for a building), which is something all property management companies will
require as a report for their own clients.

But there's more. You need all kinds of additional functionality and
integrations. For example most property owners want to integrate their systems
with emails. They may want to incorporate images of the units pre and post,
for legal purposes. Then what about documents such as leases and so on, you
need a file management system.

And then there's all the logic and validation. It's not just foreign keys and
relationship tables. Some data may be somewhat cyclical. And everything of
course needs to be performant.

In all this you also have to remember that most users are not technical, so
you need to anticipate this and prepare accordingly.

And we haven't even talked about security and other issues such as just plain
old usability. So that also has to be taken into consideration.

Then there's whitelabelling. A property management company doesn't want
records to come from the software company, it has to have their own
logo/letterhead and so on.

Beyond that you'll eventually have to start dealing with large amounts of
data. Most customers who use software for example will have more than a
handful of tenants and buildings. Possibly hundreds. So how do you present a
drop down menu to select tenants? It's easy for say under 50 tenants. But what
about someone who has 200 rentals? Now what if they have 5 years of data on
top of that. It could be a 1000 tenants in their database. And in case you're
wondering you can't really archive data because of the nature of the beast:
[http://www.followsteph.com/2009/02/09/sometimes-simple-
thing...](http://www.followsteph.com/2009/02/09/sometimes-simple-things-arent-
so-simple/) So for us that meant we had to create special custom drop down
menus that have custom sorting and coloring when prsenting tenants, so that
all current tenants appear at the top alphabetically before the older non-
current tenants. This might seem like a small details, but what you quickly
learn is that there are a LOT of them!!

Basically creating a property management software solution is a complex task,
and it's not something you can just create in a weekend or month. The minimum
viable product is quite large. In the years we've been in business I've seen a
lot of companies come and go. Most barely last more than a year or two.
There's a lot of data, situations, and features that are required to manage
properties.

And that's one of the benefits of being in this less sexy industry than say
social media, at least once you get your foothold. It takes at least 2-3 years
to get a good product going. Also because there are so many companies that
disappear quickly, many customers are only interested in purchasing from
companies that have been in business for a while. Another bias in your favor.

And this is why you don't see many people from here jump into it very often.
It's not something you can do as quickly or easily, there is a pretty high
barrier to entry. It might seem simple, but it's not. And that's an advantage
with time.

Now this isn't to say that old solutions shouldn't improve, there is room. And
someone like us has definitely disrupted the industry since we started. But
please realize that a LOT of time, effort, and money is spent on implementing
the functionality that you can't just re-skin your app every 2-3 years because
it's trendy. That's not where the value is, it's in helping people effectively
manage their properties!

PS: I'll also shortly discuss why rental payments is also similar in another
comment.

In any case, please feel free to ask me questions and I'll try to respond. A
mini AMA if you will ;)

~~~
wpfDotNet
How did you get your foot in? Since you said there is a moat in this industry.

~~~
FollowSteph3
The most basic answer, time and effort. It takes at least a few years to get
into that market. You may be able to shortcut your way by spending large
amounts of money, but otherwise it's just time and effort.

A good analogy that I like to use, as imperfect as it is, is a car company.
Getting your first car takes time, there's no way around this. You can't just
slap together parts and expect to be a major industry competitor right away.
It takes an investment of time and/or money.

You also can't slap together parts so that it looks all nice and shinny but
miss many glaring functionality. Sure I can build a vehicle with an engine,
but how many people will buy my nice and shinny vehicle if it doesn't include
say temperature control? Or if you can't go faster than 20 mph? Or if it has
no headlights? Even simple things as not having wipers can be problematic if
you don't live in a desert location.

So you have to do much like Kia and Hyundai did. It takes a large effort to
get going. You build a good car, sell it at an affordable price, and continue
to develop it and improve it over time. There's no shortcut, you can't just
build a car over a weekend or a few months. It takes some time to get going.

And of course a lot of the lessons need to be learned along the way. Until you
start, you might not realize that you can't use say part x because although
it's nice in a simple car, it can't handle temperatures below say 40F, which
means that although it can work in California, the car is completely useless
in the northern parts of the world.

In other words you have to be willing to invest time and effort. A shinny new
car will only go so far if it doesn't work. New cars that are branded lemons
quickly get eliminated from the market, no matter how new they are. And those
cars that are really good continue to sell year after year. They do get
refreshed from time to time, but you definitely don't refresh them every 2-3
years.

------
morganb180
Thousands of startups have been saying this _exact_ same thing for 10+ years
in real estate. Out of all those that tried, only two have had major success.

Why?

Entrenched interests that don't want to give up control or data for fear of
being disintermediated.

Regulations and association control that makes it tough to get traction &
adoption.

Real estate is like anything. The vast majority of transactions are done by a
fraction of the actual base. Getting traction quickly enough is very
challenging.

So while it seems like a great space, and there is tons that _should_ and
_could_ be done, it's a helluva battle to get things to change.

------
secabeen
The other big win is the amount of money in Real Estate. When most
transactions have fees on the order of 6%, there's a lot of money sloshing
around to pick up.

~~~
ezl
To put a number on it:

6% transaction fees you're talking about are probably in home sales. About
800B a year transacts in the US in home sales (existing home sales data:
[http://www.realtor.org/sites/default/files/reports/2013/emba...](http://www.realtor.org/sites/default/files/reports/2013/embargoes/ehs-12-19-ppikapwltp/ehs-11-2013-overview-2013-12-19.pdf)).
In practice, that 6% number often is a bit lower for the brokers. Also, FWIW,
on top of broker fees, you'll be paying attorneys, government taxes, etc.

In Chicago, to transact in and out of a house, you should expect to pay
between 10 and 11% (so if you buy a house for 100k and sell it for 110k, you
will break even if you're lucky).

------
FollowSteph3
Rent payment processing is another hard business to enter. It's not so much
technically a difficult problem as a fraud problem.

The problem with online payments is chargebacks. Except now instead of say a
few hundred dollars, what happens if you have a tenant that does a chargeback
for half a year's worth of rent? That's a LOT of money!!

And unlike say a retail company where you can vet your own customers, you
cannot vet the tenants of your customers (the property owners). Therefore if
someone is renting to lower quality tenants, and there are chargebacks, what
happens? Who's responsible? How long will it be before you start to have
problems with the credit companies? How long before the payment processing
company will require all kinds of hoops before they accept people into their
systems?

You basically need to become a Paypal for online payments. And so most of your
time ends up being spent dealing with fraud because the amounts are so big and
as a result the impact is so large. That's the hard problem you have to
resolve to stay in that business.

All the while remember that payment processing is a low margin business. You
cannot charge more than 3-5% for accepting credit cards. For many property
owners paying an extra 3-5% to accept rents is a non-starter. remember that
real estate renting is often a business built on leverage, so when you make
5%, that's 5% of the leveraged amount and can be quite significant in
comparison to your cash investment. It's a double edged sword, and getting hit
with an addition 3-5% can have a significant impact.

During all this time remember that there are tenants who are actively looking
for these kinds of rentals, to take advantage of this possibility. They aren't
the majority, but at the same time the majority of rentals don't accept credit
cards for rent payments.

What we tend to see people asking for this are trying it for the first time.
Most will eventually find a way to try it, and after a short while the vast
majority stop because of the above. You generally only see the bigger
companies offer it over time, and that's because they are bigger and can more
easily absorb the issues. Not only that but they have processes in place, have
better negotiating power, and so on, so it's easier in comparison for them.
But that generally means you're dealing with companies with thousands of
units, and they aren't the bulk of investors and/or property management
companies in the market.

It's a tough business. It's really a subset of a Paypal/Stripe type of
business, but with larger amounts and biggest potentials for fraud...

~~~
newleaf
I don't think many (any?) landlords accept payment by credit card. Usually
these payment solutions are tied to a bank account where the rules are much
different.

~~~
FollowSteph3
Some do. And we get many requests from people who want to. As such we tend to
try to inform them about the potential costs and risks associated. In many
cases they had no idea, so it usually ends there.

But yes some landlords do. But it rarely tends to last long. All it takes is
one bad tenant to fully appreciate the potential risks you're exposed to,
because remember that rent is generally applied against a mortgage.

------
thatthatis
#6 -- the value per transaction is enormous.

5th percentile spend per year on an apartment is about $6,000.

95th percentile hobbyist spend per year on photo stuff is probably less than
$6,000

------
FollowSteph3
I've noticed that most people here when thinking about real estate related
business focus on finding rentals. That's because that's what renters tend to
see and therefore know.

Unfortunately happens to a very saturated business. Not only that but it's
extremely hard to make a profit. Who pays for the service? I've yet to see
anyone but the property owner that's lasted.

But more importantly is it worth paying for? Is the website big enough to have
enough people looking on it for rentals? Maybe craigslist, but what about a
new website?

It's a chicken and egg problem. Until you have enough rentals no one uses your
website to find rentals. So what these companies tend to do is scrape content,
or load it from somewhere. But is it sustainable?

It basically falls into a winner takes all type of business. And sadly I
haven't anyone get big enough to take a commanding lead, so most look like
sites that were slapped together and eventually had to fall back to ads, and
then have been left to slowly rot. Not all but that's the majority...

------
mtmail
Apartment discovery is already well served. There are a dozen new startups
that apply innovative methods to search.
[http://www.apartmentlist.com/](http://www.apartmentlist.com/),
[https://livelovely.com/](https://livelovely.com/),
[http://42floors.com/](http://42floors.com/) come to mind.

Software for estate agents needs to be become more modern though.
[http://nestio.com/](http://nestio.com/) just rebranded themselves to do that
for example.

There's a German property portal (number two in the market) which released an
iPad app for estate agents. Property management, contact list, calendar etc.
Something like 50 USD/month for the app or $100/month for the hardware&app.
Website is in German, but there are screenshots and video
[http://immonetmanager.de/produkt/](http://immonetmanager.de/produkt/)

~~~
triangleman
You know what's great? The Craigslist map search for housing.

~~~
selimthegrim
Do people not use Zillow anymore?

------
malyk
I currently work at a Real Estate startup. It's a very interesting space with
an enormous amount of opportunity for innovation including search, mortgages,
notaries, inspections, document delivery/storage, legal, moving, CRM, etc.

If any ruby/rails engineers in the bay area are looking for a new gig send me
an email. I'm trying to hire people!

------
lancewiggs
At 200Square.co.nz we are using web tools and an enlightened approach to sales
to improve the real estate sales process. In short we sell properties, and
with much lower costs than all of the old school real estate agencies.

Our key founder combines real estate and Valley backgrounds - as someone
mentioned it's really important that we understand the industry we are trying
to disrupt.

We have a suite of tools, focus on effective promotion techniques rather than
self promoting and wildly expensive newspaper and industry glossies, and sell
far more houses per agent than the norm.

We put together a site (watchmystreet.co.nz) that lets people flip the buying
search process, but struggle for now accessing what should be openly available
data from regional authorities.

Happy to discuss help with expansion or entry into other markets.

------
ChrisNorstrom
BTW, I've got some real estate themed domains (and a logo or two) left over
from a failed project if anyone's startup is looking for a name & logo.

⌂ DomainEstat.es

⌂ FindHom.es

⌂ FindProperti.es

⌂ FindEstat.es

They use the .es tld so you can do things like FindHom.es/chicago or
FindProperti.es/newyork

------
mrfusion
Ok, here's a real estate start up idea I just had. (BTW I'd actually be
interested in working on this, so contact me if you're interested in joining
forces.)

Use the Oculus Rift to let potential buyers and renters take a virtual tour of
properties.

Think how much time is currently wasted driving between properties. And many
people probably end up with non-optimal purchases since they can only
reasonably visit < 10 properties.

Is there some kind of 3D scanning equipment that would let my potential
startup create a virtual environment by walking through a house with it? I
guess there might be a technology gap there. Anyone know?

~~~
jamiequint
Matterport (YC Company) - [http://matterport.com/](http://matterport.com/)

~~~
mrfusion
Thanks. I wonder how that one compares to this one which will cost an order of
magnitude less?

[http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/occipital/structure-
sens...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/occipital/structure-sensor-
capture-the-world-in-3d)

------
cornellwright
One of the ways I like to think about good start-up ideas is find a business
stuck in the '90s and bring it to the '00s using this decade's tech that's
already been invented.

------
davemel37
For those that think real estate tech is wide open, here is a guide of 101
tech startups (and some established ones) I found in the Commercial real
estate space...

I found these by browsing tags in angellist, crunchbase, and attendee and
exhibitor lists of CRE tech conferences, etc...

None of this touches the internal tech many large brokerages build for their
own workflows...

[http://www.papershare.com/paper/101-technologies](http://www.papershare.com/paper/101-technologies)

~~~
tim333
My papershare asks for a stupid bunch of stuff before it'll let you read
anything. For twitter it demands the right to edit my profile and tweet on my
behalf for example.

------
jimnatel
I would add that with tablets and smart phones, it is now possible to bring
your apps on the fields. A few year ago, it was very difficult to bring your
computer on a construction site. Some startups (for instance Aproplan
[http://www.aproplan.com](http://www.aproplan.com) ) are already jumping on
these new possibilities.

~~~
simoncion
> A few year ago, it was very difficult to bring your computer on a
> construction site.

Pardon? Rugged computers (like business Thinkpads and Toughbooks) have existed
for _far_ more than a decade. I would more readily take such a thing to a
construction site than an iDevice or an Android tablet.

~~~
jimnatel
Yes, of course, you could bring your computer but it is not at all the same to
carry an heavy computer or to have a smart phone in your pocket. For instance,
you can use your phone or your tablet all along the site during a handover to
take notes and pictures. It is a lot more difficult to do that with a computer

~~~
simoncion
Your point about tiny, portable cameras is well taken. OTOH, tiny point-and-
shoot cameras that fit in a shirt pocket have been around for ages, and are
(for the picture quality) far cheaper than a phone.

The Toughbook CF-M34 (introduced no later than 1999... [That's almost a decade
and a half ago.]) weighs four pounds (only 4x heavier than a current iPad, or
2.6x heavier than a first-gen iPad) and has a hand-strap [0][1]. Frankly, I'd
almost always prefer to type one-handed than to use a software keyboard. If
you've work gloves on, you're going to find it really tough to use a
capacitive touchscreen. And, if you work in construction, you're probably
strong enough to hold a four pound device out at arms length for extended
periods. :)

The innovation that modern tablets brought to the world was not to make mobile
computing easy, but to make a mobile computer that's nothing but screen. I
don't know your personal history, but if you're an early twenty-something,
you're likely to be unaware of much of the very useful portable computing that
was done and continues to be done (without modern tablets and smartphones!) by
folks who do and manage physical labor for a living.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Toughbook-
cf-m34_2.jpg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Toughbook-cf-m34_2.jpg)

[1]
[http://static.miklos.ca/docs/panasonic_toughbook_cf-m34.pdf](http://static.miklos.ca/docs/panasonic_toughbook_cf-m34.pdf)

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mottey
We're a new start up trying to make a difference here in Australia with real
estate listings that provide ad free, clean and simple design but also build a
community for discussion of the best places to live:
[http://www.homely.com.au/](http://www.homely.com.au/)

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nychacker133
Couldn't agree more that innovation is coming fast to the real estate
industry. Check out Rentista, an IT portal for brokers and tenants to better
manage the apartment application process in NYC (particularly the document
aspect)... www.rentistanyc.com

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1986v
Man, thank you so much for posting this. For a while I have been pondering on
a few real estate based ideas, sadly I even half-assed a mobile cms for real
estate, collected prospective agents and then let it all go.

Time to get moving!

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tk999
If anybody interested to work together on a software project, ping me as well.
I am interested to work on a real estate based project.

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tmzt
For anyone doing payments in the rent payment space, please offer an every 2/4
weeks option for people paid bi-weekly.

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michaelochurch
Residential real estate is decidedly unprestigious, a business that hurts
people-- just look at what house prices and rents have done over the past 20
years-- and the major benefit of working in it, as the OP argues, is that it
lacks hard technical problems. There will still be hard problems to solve, but
they'll be people problems: dealing with incompetent but powerful management
companies, blowback from very rich entrenched interests, etc.

Smart competition isn't that scary. I'd rather have smart competitors and
learn a lot even if I lose, than work in a world where stupid people have all
the power. If you go into the dark recesses of residential real estate, you'll
find that it's not smart-people-friendly. Residential RE might be one area
where average-to-stupid people have an edge, because they're closer to the
animalistic instincts (i.e. the 86th floor being twice as valuable than the
functionally equivalent 85th because it's "the top") that drive it.

It might be attractive to business co-founders looking to build something
boring and flip it, but it's not going to get class-A _technical_ co-founders.

This space has the lack-of-upside that would cause VCs to deride it as a
"lifestyle business", but because of all the un-fun shit that humans throw up
when it comes to land and housing (people get really ugly when that stuff is
at stake) it wouldn't have the subjective benefits.

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rfnslyr
You're missing a closing ")" on p class="pad"

