DGS 274: List Smarter, Lease Faster with RentFinder.AI
Description
How do you figure out the most accurate market prices for rents on your properties?
In this episode of the #DoorGrowShow, property management growth expert Jason Hull sits down with Nathan Jackson from RentFinder.ai to talk about how you can level up your listing game.
You’ll Learn
[01:24 ] The creation of RentFinder.ai
[05:06 ] An AI tool for finding rent prices
[09:17 ] Making the switch from one tool to another
[13:00 ] Customizability and integration
Tweetables
“You come up with something cool and you show it to your friends, then other people are going to want it.”
“You can either have it done accurate, cheap, fast, but you can't have all three.”
“I think early adopters to it are going to reap a lot of rewards and a lot of benefits financially and otherwise.”
“Once the entire world catches up, you know, and adopts these things, then it can be a bit more competitive, a bit more of a challenge.”
Resources
Transcript
[00:00:00 ] Jason: I think early adopters to it are going to reap a lot of rewards and a lot of benefits financially and otherwise. Once the entire world catches up, you know, and adopts these things, then it can be a bit more competitive, a bit more of a challenge.
[00:00:14 ] Welcome DoorGrow property managers to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing in business and life, and you're open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow property manager.
[00:00:32 ] DoorGrow Property Managers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it. You think they're crazy for not. Because you realize that property management is the ultimate, high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management business owners and their businesses. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I'm your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow.
[00:01:14 ] Now let's get into the show. So today I'm hanging out with Nathan Jackson. Welcome Nathan.
[00:01:22 ] Nathan: Hey, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.
[00:01:24 ] Jason: So Nathan, is with RentFinder.ai and so Nathan, before we get into talking about RentFinder, which I think is a super cool tool. I've gotten to take a look at it, play with it a bit.
[00:01:36 ] I want to get into the audience hearing a little bit about your background. How did you get into playing around with property management related stuff. What's your history here.
[00:01:47 ] Nathan: Yeah. so my background is really you know, kind of growing up as a kid, technology was kind of my life, the most important thing to me.
[00:01:52 ] But as I got towards that age for college, I was more interested in the finance side of things. So I went to school to get a degree in finance and investments. I lived in Manhattan for a little while, and then I also ended up starting my workout for a property management firm doing data analytics.
[00:02:07 ] That was kind of the first thing I started doing. And when I got in the door, it was one of those things where I just slowly started gravitating more towards the data analytics and technology at the same time. And as the company I was with called ONEprop got acquired ultimately by a company that rolled up into HRG, I kept being more on that analyst side role, but then also doing more with automation technology.
[00:02:28 ] And that entire side of the business you know, obviously the space, even five, six years ago was very immature from a tech side. And so I saw all sorts of opportunities to kind of get into that space. And then after being with the company that was acquired by HRG I came over to a company called Specialized Property Management and that's where I've been for about five years.
[00:02:47 ] And then I've been leading all of our technology efforts here at Specialized Property Management. So even with the background in finance, I kind of gravitated back towards my roots, which is tech and all that space. So that's what I've been doing here. We've been building software internally, building sort of, integration type stuff and all sorts of cool tools here at Specialized.
[00:03:04 ] And then RentFinder was born out of Specialized. So it's kind of where we are today.
[00:03:08 ] Jason: Got it. And so I know Chuck Thompson and he's, is he CEO of Specialized or? Yes. Yeah. He's CEO. Yeah. So He used to be part of the RPM franchise and he was a client of mine and helped him with websites and, you know, some other things early on.
[00:03:28 ] And he's got some other like former RPM people that are part of his his organization as well. And that are connected to this like Rod Schifferdecker past client as well. So, I mean, it's really cool to see, like, I've got clients creating stuff now that can benefit my clients. Like, that's really awesome.
[00:03:45 ] Nathan: It's great, great circle of life there. Yeah.
[00:03:47 ] Jason: Yeah, it's really cool. So, RentFinder.ai was developed to solve what problem? What was the problem that Specialized was having with all the other rental tools? Because there's a bunch of them out there.
[00:03:59 ] Nathan: Yeah, so fundamentally that's a great question.
[00:04:01 ] We built this solely as an internal tool to begin with. We had no intention of launching this as a product whatsoever. We were just going to all the different sort of rental evaluation tools that were out there, whether it was a Zillow, whether it was a Rentometer, whether it was a RentRange, a RentFax, there was just fundamental problems with every one of them.
[00:04:18 ] And with a lot of my work that I've been working on with Specialized, we got really heavy into the, you know, AI statistical modeling and deeper science behind how to do some stuff with data. And I said, Hey, I think I can build a better tool, build a better mousetrap to do this. And it was one of those things where just kind of organically, we started building out internal models to price out for our own agents.
[00:04:37 ] We started sharing it with some key clients and one day we had a key client say, Hey, you know what? I would love to share this with my investment partner. Can we go ahead and get an account for them set up? And all of a sudden we went from checking five, 10 a day to, you know, within a few months of just building internally, running hundreds and hundreds.
[00:04:53 ] And it's just sort of been off to the race ever since then scaling the same space. So.
[00:04:57 ] Jason: I mean, you come up with something cool and you show it to your friends, then other people are going to want it. Yeah, that's true. And so you guys have built the better mousetrap. You guys have built this cool tool.
[00:05:06 ] So tell everybody, like, what is RentFinder.ai. Let's start there.
[00:05:10 ] Nathan: So fundamentally, if you know those tools like RentRange or rentometer we're fundamentally providing a very similar service. The key differentiators of what we do specifically versus them is that we are taking in just say a monstrous amount of data, the price out of home.
[00:05:23 ] You know, we're not looking at just like the recent comp, plus the beds, bathroom square footage. We're looking at hundreds of data points per property, all the little things that you don't necessarily think about on any sort of listing that you see, we're looking at photos of the property. We're doing an analysis of what exactly the inside of the home looks like if we have them as well as a virtual tour scan.
[00:05:41 ] We're basically trying to look at the nitty gritty about what really makes a home rentable. And when you find what makes a home rentable. You can really hone in on that price because it's pretty easy to look at two homes on paper, a 3, 000 square foot, three, two next to a 3, 000 square foot, three, two and say, Oh, they're the same.
[00:05:56 ] But we all know that's not the case when you walk in the door, right? One home is a lot prettier and a lot better than the other. And fundamentally that was the aspect that's been missing. So we've added that into our analysis. And we've been able to really hone in on very, you know, precision rents by going that route and just going way beyond the limited amounts of data the other tools use.
[00:06:14 ] Jason: So you said there's like hundreds of different data points. Can you give us an
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