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Launch HN: Propify (YC W23) – Property Management System API Aggregator
95 points by kole78 on March 15, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 56 comments
Hey HN, we are Remen, Ben, and Nick, the founders of Propify (https://getpropify.com), an API aggregator for residential property management. We abstract over archaic APIs and merge them into a single modern API for the real estate industry, giving companies access to multiple property management systems (PMSs) via a REST API. Think merge.dev or Plaid for real estate.

Property managers nowadays use software to operate residential rental properties. Our customers are not these property managers directly, but companies who provide services to both property managers and renters. Our customers are solving problems around resident screening, security, parking, maintenance, etc., which property managers typically outsource.

Compared to most other industries in 2023, property management still runs on old tech with bad/wrong/absent API documentation. Creating and maintaining integrations with these systems is incredibly painful (1999 called and wants to tell you about its cool new SOAP technology!)

As an example of what we’re solving for, one prospective customer told us they regularly get 503 (service unavailable) errors from one of these PMSs at the beginning of each month because the system can’t process rent payments and other requests at the same time. We address challenges like this using an exponential backoff retry strategy.

We abstract over all these APIs to give our customers software they can reasonably use. Our goal is to eliminate old tech, poor docs, and unreliable infra for our customers so they can focus on delivering value instead of fighting with integrations.

We offer a tested RESTful API with accurate documentation and modern architecture that we can scale. In addition, we want to make the developer experience as good as possible with things like webhooks, SDKs, websockets, and even a GraphQL API (coming later this year).

Before Propify, we built a rent payment app to bridge the technology gap between renters and landlords. Then we encountered the pain of PMS integrations and decided to pivot and solve that problem instead.

dang suggested that we include a product demo or video but since our core product is an API, there’s not that much to show—sorry! But our docs are here: https://docs.getpropify.com/, and if you’re working/interested in this space and have your own credentials for one of our supported integrations, we’ll be happy to get you a sandbox account and a demo.

This industry has been stagnant because of the barrier to entry for integrating with these vital PM systems. Our goal is to unlock innovation by pulling real estate tech into the modern world. Developer experience is incredibly important to us, and we are actively looking for areas where we can improve. We welcome your feedback, questions, and comments!




I work with multiple PMS platforms and centralizing even a simple unit price table is hellish given different PMS have different paradigms for concepts such as unit pricing. For example, Yardi (depending on the version of course) has 3 different tables for Market Price of a unit flying around in the backend, each with a slightly different definition.

Another issue (for users not API creators) is the lack of universal KPI definition - there are at least 6 major ways of calculating occupancy, each one needing its own specific dataset (economic occupancy, physical occupancy, economic occupancy revenue generating units, physical occupancy revenue generating units, trending occupancy, trending occupancy revenue generating units)

Concepts such as renewal ratio and collection ratio are particularly difficult due to their time component. Most of the pain comes not from getting the data out of the PMS through an API but rather knowing WHAT data is needed and for what KPI.


Totally agree! This is part of the conversation with each of our customers. We have learned early that this is a part of the pain and we are solving it in two ways:

1. Rapidly developing a deep understanding for naming and meaning within each PMS so we can speak intelligently, and properly guide our customers to focus on the data they care about.

2. Technically, we have data transformations at a couple different layers so we can repoint data coming in to exist in customer-specific locations for their business needs.


zdms, where do you work? would love to connect & chat more. i'm facing this same problem. my email in profile.


I wish this was a thing back in 2012 when I was the technical co-founder of Rentlytics! We built our own integrations and it was terrible working with these systems. The docs were non existent and APIs limited in their capabilities to further vendor lock in.

What systems do you support? I couldn't find a list anywhere.


Thanks for your feedback! Unfortunately your story is a common one - not much has changed with these APIs since 2012... or since 1999 for that matter.

Our current integrations include Yardi, RealPage, Entrata, Propertyware, Buildium, Rent Manager and Rentvine. On the roadmap are Appfolio, MRI and ResMan.

Necessary disclaimer: we only support integrations for customers who have officially sanctioned relationships with each PMS. We do not do anything that violates ToS (e.g. scraping, chrome extensions, etc.).


Ah, I went to your "How it Works".. didn't see Yardi, RealPage, or MRI and almost dismissed this product entirely!

Recommend updating that screenshot!

Now I'm interested.. will submit work email. I'm head of product at RealINSIGHT


From my memory some of the big players require api license fees in the thousands per api. It was my understanding that these are to be paid by every implementor using their docs. How are you guys getting API access to build? Is this not really as common anymore?


Some of the systems remain pay-to-play for sure. We have adopted the consultant model where we are implementing our solution on behalf of our customers. This is why we require our customers to have their own relationship with each PMS. Their credentials are used to access each API. I sent a connect request to you on LI - happy to chat in more detail!


> Rentlytics

I read this as "Rently Ticks". Not a great name!


Can you give some example use cases for this? For context I own some investment properties and have a property manager who manages them, so I have some familiarity with tools like Appfolio (but probably not as much as you'd expect your target customer to have).

I'm just curious what this would be used for. Maybe user story style - as <who> I would be able to <what>.


Of course! Let me give this a shot with a couple examples in your suggested format...

- As an engineer for a tenant background check company, I can use Propify to easily integrate with systems like Entrata, Buildium and Propertyware so that I only need to create a single integration instead of 3.

- As a sales rep for a property maintenance company, I can confidently sell into new property managers who use systems that we don't integrate with yet because I know a new integration for our engineering team is basically like flipping a switch.


Aaah, got it now - thank you!


Should probably clarify in the title that this is for property management, not real estate. MLS data is notoriously impossible to get without huge contracts, which is what made want to check this out.


what's the deal with MLS data? That sounds pretty interesting, some kind of protective moat they have in place? What's the backstory there?


>what's the deal with MLS data? That sounds pretty interesting, some kind of protective moat they have in place? What's the backstory there?

It's just extremely valuable, so they won't give it out willy nilly. There's a network effect at work, where it's almost impossible to sell your home without listing with them, so everyone does. And mortgages are just about the most lucrative consumer financial transaction there is, so lots of incentive to keep it on lock.


interesting, blocking out the buyers at least

""" Can buyers access the multiple listing service without a realtor?

The short answer is no, they can’t — at least not directly. In order to access the MLS, you need a real estate license, which means it’s not possible for buyers to have direct access to this data on their own. However, they can reap the benefits the MLS has to offer if they start the house buying process off right and partner with a local real estate agent. """ https://listwithclever.com/real-estate-blog/get-access-mls-w....


Why do you only focus on residential PMS's? From my perspective, I think commercial property management would have a larger opportunity to leverage APIs for market analytics, pro formas analysis using KPIs talked about in earlier parts of this thread, and DD (historically one of the biggest pain points for RE).

Credentials: Sr Product Manager at Amazon in the RE Team (Amazon Fulfillment), former BTS commercial property developer, and current luxury residential Real Estate agent with MLS access.


I misread it the same way--I've been praying for a good API to do some housing affordability data projects.


What sort of API? I’m working on another real estate project and were focusing on generic listings APIs. Would love to know your use case.


My research is in urban planning so I mostly use city/state/federal data and occasionally data from court cases.

Most of that data is sparsely updated and I'm not clued in on many real estate APIs to track up-to-date trends in housing and prices so I would love to know more about what your work looks like!


Updated. Thanks for the feedback!


I’ve seen a lot of appfolio usage in the rental application process in the last two years. https://www.appfolio.com/

I’m wondering if that tooling is more customer facing and the Propify solution is more I don’t know business to business oriented for the folks that serve property managers? It’s interesting to see this space take off into tech, better than mailing a check and doing email tag.


You are 100% correct. Propify is focused on the relationships between companies like the rental application processors and the property managers who use systems like Appfolio. We really appreciate the kind words and hope to be as helpful as possible in pushing this industry forward!


3 questions:

1. Where are the docs for Webhooks?´

2. Is there any way to get only partial data, which was updated since the last time we hit your API? Is there a way to use a date-based cursor?

3. Is the data being saved (and duplicated) in your server, or are you simply parsing the request, converting to the PMS format, hitting their API, formatting the data, and sending it back, every time?

edit: formatting


Thanks for the questions!

1. Docs for webhooks are located in our app (after login). But a basic outline is that you add your URL, add any custom headers you wish, get the signing key, subscribe to an event and you're off the races. Events that we currently support are Job Success, Job Failure, New Data, Diff Data. Probably the most popular event (as you have alluded to in your next question) is our Diff Data event. The payload for this event will return only the data that has changed for a particular record since the last time we received data from a PMS.

2. Currently, not via the API. We will be adding more features like this to the API in the coming weeks. For now, our customers seem to prefer the Diff Data webhook anyway.

3. We do cache the data. One of the hallmarks of PMS APIs is that they are unreliable. That being the case, all of the data served from our API is from our cache so we can pass along our uptime SLA benefits to our customers.


Thank you for responding so promptly! That seems quite interesting :).

Diff data + new data definitely seem what 90% of your customers will need.

Another quick question: When you say "Job Success/Failure", what's a job?

_Full disclosure: I work at LeadSimple <https://www.leadsimple.com> and we integrate with most of these companies ourselves, and these questions were just me being interested in knowing how you solved (or intend to solve) some of the same problems we had to solve when integrating with them :)_


Of course, since we are not a pass-through API, our tech is set up as an async ETL. So a job represents a unit of work for Propify either fetching data from or pushing data to a PMS. You can track jobs to understand the lifecycle of your requests and overall status of your integrations.


Oh, got it, because you'll save any POST/PATCH request and try updating it in the PMS in case they've been down. That's cool, thank you for clarifying that :)


Very nice!

I wish you had a page listing which vendors you currently integrate with. I was able to find it in the docs though, eventually.


Curious how you implemented this to be more reliable? Headless browsers or official APIs?


Great point of clarity. We made a business decision to only leverage actual APIs from these companies. As a result, our customers are still required to have an official relationship with each PMS they want to integrate with. We have made it a point to not do anything that violates ToS for each of these systems.

While we do possess some insight into how to more easily navigate the business development process with each PMS (and we help our customers do so), we do not help or encourage anyone to circumvent the process altogether.

Without naming specifics, it seems you have identified perhaps one of the more closed systems.


Very interesting proposition. Curious, which PMSs are you integrating with first?

I'm the CTO of https://obeyo.com and integrations are a huge thing for us.


Ben said he's talking to you all next week! Looking forward to it.

Our current integrations include Yardi, RealPage, Entrata, Propertyware, Buildium, Rent Manager and Rentvine. On the roadmap are Appfolio, MRI and ResMan.


I’m delighted to discover that offering an API by itself (that too specific to one domain) is a valuable business model! Congrats on the launch folks!


What? There are tons of API businesses. Many of them are massive companies.


As someone who was house shopping recently, I’d have paid $100 for this!

Good to know you’ll be here a year from now when we move next!!


It's my understanding that PropertyWare requires large licensing fees to access their API. How are these fees managed for your development/testing/production access, and how are they (or not) passed on to your customer?


Propertyware does charge an access fee, you are correct. Additionally, they offer a licensing agreement where their customers can provide API keys to consultants to help them build out their tool(s). We are one of those consultants.

As far as who assumes the access fees, they are managed strictly by our customers and we have no pass-through pricing on that side. Our pricing is solely based on our own costs, infra, value, etc. All of our customers get access to all of our integrations (current and future) as part of our standard pricing model.


Very interesting. Doing any work in the short term rental PMS space?


Not currently, but we have discussed the possibility in the future


if you do, consider approaching it in a similar manner. a single operation for multiple short term rental managers would be quite useful


Are y'all based out of Lafayette, Colorado by any chance?


Haha strange question, but no. We are in SF for the YC batch, and then back to Boston where we all normally live.


I talked to someone at a co-working space in Lafayette who was a member of a company there and they were working on a similar project. I can't for the life of me remember anything else about it though.

Best wishes to you all with the startup.


Really interesting! Just for curiosity, is your BE implemented with Python?


No python (yet)


Would love to know who your clients are so we could patronise them :)


Integration is always a pain in this space.


How do you plan to fight actors like Zillow?


Do you integrate with Stessa or Roofstock?


Right now we are focused on multifamily PMS's, but we will be adding other integrations like Roofstock down the road.


Awesome concept! Good luck!


Thank you!


Hmmmm, interesting


HouseCannary

Look them up


Hear me out: instead, you could put the slightest bit of effort in and tell us what they are and why they are relevant.




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