Show HN: Tenence – Making Renting Easier

http://www.tenence.com

37 51 9 years ago

josho• 9 years ago

Someone on your team is a talented designer and has built a beautiful site. Unfortunately, the scroll-jacking and large visuals take away from the UX side of things. Ask yourself which of those images clarifies your service and which distract from the message you are trying to communicate.

Oh, and change 'Our business model explained'. That language makes sense for startup junkies and business folk. But, has no place on your landing page, something like 'How we'll help you find a renter' is much more relevant to your audience.

aaronmacy• 9 years ago

Unfortunately, the scroll-jacking and large visuals take away from the UX side of things.

This. I didn't proceed through site because I can't stand scroll-jacking.

ams6110• 9 years ago

Same. I don't have time to figure out what novelty you've substituted for normal scrolling, but when there's no scroll bar and "Page Down" doesn't do anything, I move on.

markdown• 9 years ago

It's one of the worst offenders I've ever seen.

You know those carousels everybody hates that everybody puts on their websites... this startup made their entire website a carousel :(

halotrope• 9 years ago

Might be bad on Desktop but completely breaks the site on iPhone

aetherson4• 9 years ago

Also, some of the text on this site is actually very difficult to read due to lack of contrast with the background images. (Specifically, the concierge and repairs text against the image of the woman with the long blonde hair).

faisalkhalid803• 9 years ago

Founder here. Just wanted to say I hear you and the other comments below echo'ing your feedback and am going to get on it!

bschwindHN• 9 years ago

This is a static page. It doesn't need JavaScript. It doesn't need a loading screen. It doesn't need scroll-jacking. It doesn't need to pollute my browser history.

These kinds of decisions make zero sense to me. It's not only easier to implement a static page without all this stuff, it's more pleasant to the people you want looking at the page.

You have grammatical mistakes and poor design choices (thin white text which runs over a woman's blonde hair).

The page weighs in at 38.1 MB and took my browser 20 seconds to load.

Even if the scroll-jacking wasn't a bother, it performs horribly and takes seconds to move between pages.

Sorry to be harsh, but I can't believe any reasonable person took a look at this and gave it an okay.

dharness• 9 years ago

I also have left basically not knowing what your company does because of that scroll-diddling

bbcbasic2• 9 years ago

Making renting easier shouldn't require UX. Just eli5 on a motherfuckingwebsite style page.

keithnz• 9 years ago

funny thing, it doesn't find you a renter, it helps you rent out a place from someone else.

The messaging is bad, it took me a while to work that part out

bundi22• 9 years ago

https://jetsmarter.com/

beager3• 9 years ago

Oh boy. And in Tenence's html:

<html ng-app=JetSmarter>

Definitely not a good look at all.

Etheryte• 9 years ago

Talk about an embarrassing flop.

msy• 9 years ago

I cannot read the logo, it would be more appropriate for a sci-fi game.

pmalynin• 9 years ago

In fact, those E's look an awful lot like those of EVE Online.

simplehuman• 9 years ago

Page does not load

Edit: turns out it loads, just unusable on mobile.

bbcbasic2• 9 years ago

Yes gave up too. Have a fairly modern phone, loads most sites well. I can watch Netflix on ellular data no problems. But this site is unusable.

cialowicz• 9 years ago

Our staff are here to serve you. Fallen sick and need someone to go buy your meds? We will do it. And do much more.

Why is this part of the service? Seems really strange to offer that.

aetherson4• 9 years ago

I agree, the concierge services felt like a weirdly distinct service.

Also, the business model seems weird. Why would someone pay $100/month for, hopefully, years in order to cut down on one-time costs and hassles around the initial renting? Regardless of whether it ends up being cost-beneficial, it just seemed like a weird match to me. You're "subscribing" to a service that does a bunch for you in month 1 and then nothing in later months.

Maybe that's what the concierge part of the service is meant to address, but I'm very dubious of that portion of the business.

achow2• 9 years ago

One has to dig through to discover this..

Once the member has finalized a place, we take over. We deal with onboarding, the security deposit, and rent the flat for the member... After the member moves in, we provide him/her with a host of services ranging from helping them when they are home and sick, to coordinating repairs.

As mentioned by others, the whole site is making a heavy weather out of simple (and seems like a useful) concept.

beager3• 9 years ago

It's a shame that a tagline like "Making Renting Easier" resolves to something that is, even after a few goes at parsing, still fully opaque to me. I clicked through because, as a sufferer of the abusive NYC renting game, anything to ameliorate the hassle of renting, and anything to disintermediate low-effort-but-high-cost real estate agents, are attractive to me. But without some insight into the true nature of your business, I'm left not just uninterested, but confused.

What is your business? Who is involved in it? Is it an REIT that manages its holdings for renters? Are you a marketplace? What specific services do you provide? Who are your customers?

faisalkhalid803• 9 years ago

Hi, founder here. Feedback noted and I'll try to explain the concept a bit better. In London, which is where I am, if you rent a flat as a company - which a lot of international companies do, for their employees - you get treated really well by letting agents + landlords. As a corporate renter you generally don't have to pay a security deposit; you get favourable contractual terms; and you only need to provide your financial and other documents once. All in all it's much easier and better to rent as a corporate vs renting as an individual. So there is an arbitrage opportunity. We enable individuals to capture this arbitrage opportunity. We provide the 'company' which rents the flat - whichever flat you want - for you.

beager3• 9 years ago

Thanks for that. I understand the idea now. I hope you'll be able to convey it as well on your site and through your marketing. I would also not shy away from marketing the business as narrowly-focused on London, if that's where you are, and if that's where the prevalence of the dynamic you mentioned is greatest. Because looking at it, I feel like it could help me rent a place in NYC, Nebraska, Jakarta, or New Zealand. If Londoners are likely to comprehend the concept anyway, it would only help to be specific about your geographic focus.

lxe• 9 years ago

This is a much better explanation of what this service is compared to anything on the website.

laurent123456• 9 years ago

I still don't quite get how it will work. First in the UK it takes 10 minutes to create a new company, yet I doubt that agents and landlords would not require a deposit from such a company - maybe it needs to have a certain size, number of employees and have been around for several years.

Also if the renters don't have to pay a deposit, isn't it likely that some (maybe many) tenants will move out of the flat without even telling you (not to mention taking the TV and other valuable stuff with them)? Finally £99 per month after a year is more than a deposit, except renters have no way to get back this money. I don't mean to criticise but I honestly don't understand how it can work.

OhSoHumble• 9 years ago

The text on 'our services' is hard to read.

I read the logo as renence.

I have literally never heard the phrase 'onboarding' used outside of a business organization. If I was explaining this to my mom as "yeah, it lets you skip onboarding when you're renting a new place" she would look at me funny.

The URL for this site ends in a .com but the price is listed in pounds. Where is this service offered?

I can't scroll back up; I can only move down the page. Make it so that the mouse scroll bar can trigger transitions?

I feel like 'services' and 'business model' should be swapped.

All in all, I really the business model.

snowpeas• 9 years ago

"I've thought about this for five minutes so I'm as much an expert as lifelong landlords"

ryan-allen• 9 years ago

How do you know that the owners/staff aren't experienced as landlords or professional property managers?

franciscop2• 9 years ago

I am curious about the economies of it and scalability. From the high price/month I'm thinking it's not easily scalable for you. Which makes sense as paying 99L/month doesn't make sense for most of the world. But have you thought about doing a self-managed version for a % of the renting price? You'd be able to reach a much larger audience.

faisalkhalid803• 9 years ago

Interesting. What do you mean by self managed version? (Founder here)

foota• 9 years ago

Not OP, but I believe they mean allowing other people to use your... platform? to provide the service to customers. Kinda like hosted vs onprem.

franciscop2• 9 years ago

As @foota said, what I mean is that now you have 3 steps from what I read in the landing page:

1. You find a place

2. We rent it

3. We manage it

What I mean is to offer the step 3 as optional; charge for the step 2 a % (I believe standard for real state agencies is 1 month, just A/B test it) and change the step 3:

- Keep it as is but optional.

- Set it up so there are services the user can get and pay as they go.

- Make the rent payment through your platform and get a small % of that.

AFAIK the real problem is setting up initially, the management month-to-month for a long term stay is more of an occasional thing and making it 99L/month mandatory would limit the use a lot.

jiangth• 9 years ago

I'm actually very interested in the service but the site is really hard to consume. Sorry

sparky_z• 9 years ago

It took me quite a while to figure out that this was a service for renters, not a property management service for absentee landlords. The home page text reinforces this because at first glance

"Rent your Home through Tenence"

reads more like

"Rent [out] your home [to other people] through Tenence"

than

"Rent your [new] home [from any landlord] through Tenence"

You can read a lot of the following pages through that same lens without any red flags (just what seems like awkward phrasing in a few spots, like "You become a member. And we then do everything on our books (as a company) to rent out the place you want."). It wasn't until I got all the way to the "Membership Benefits" page that everything became clear, At that point, I had to go back and reread everything from a renter's perspective to figure out what the business even was.

I gave this a hell of a lot more focused attention because it was presented on HN. If I'd stumbled on this page some other way, I would have written it off in 10 seconds. "I don't own a home. I'm not the target audience here."

gigatexal• 9 years ago

Yes I thought this was a service that basically would be my rental agency for my property but it's not. It's like a wework

aerovistae• 9 years ago

All I got was a grey background with the logo in the middle. Nothing else loaded and after 10 seconds I left.

bernardino• 9 years ago

In similar note to Tenence, Cozy (https://cozy.co) is also pretty interesting.

P.s. The user interface needs work for both web and mobile. Just keep it simple.

doodlebugging• 9 years ago

Landlord here with a few questions (one single-family home in USA). I may not be the target landlord but your service is interesting.

What is the incentive for me to use your service by renting to what is essentially a middleman tenant management company? I understand that you are currently in the UK and may possibly be operating in other areas or have plans to do so. What advantages are there for a landlord to deal indirectly with tenants? What value does the middleman add on my end?

I currently screen tenants (been working on that today in fact) so that I can understand who they are, where they are in life and how they view the world. I interview each prospective tenant to help me understand the things about my property that may be problematic for them to use or maintain. At the end of the day I really just want to have tenants who appreciate the work that I put into preparing my property for them to use as a home during their tenancy. I need to have people that I can trust to help me maintain it and to keep it clean for the next guy.

Where does your service add value to my operation other than possibly in pre-screening tenants for me or in guaranteeing that I am paid on time? If you are functioning as a middleman involved in placing corporate personnel in suitable housing at company expense while they are on temporary assignment where do I benefit? What incentive does a tenant using your service have to use the rental property responsibly, avoiding damages and reporting maintenance issues in a timely manner so that the property owner can address small issues before they become major repair problems?

Assuming that the tenant reports a maintenance issue to your service - do you handle service and repair? Do you contact repair person? Do you describe the problem and schedule repair? Do you keep tenant in the loop concerning ingress and egress for repairs? Do you ensure that contractors and service personnel are paid so that there can be no liens placed on my property by unhappy contractors? Do you use your own vetted contractors and tradesmen or do you use mine? In my case, I use people who are very familiar with the property since they have been helping me maintain it for more than a decade.

I'd be interested in hearing your reply.

Also on a different note - I read all the text on the site that I could find. Like others I was initially confused by the phrasing in that I thought you may be offering some sort of tenant locator or screening process service for landlords. I figured it out though. I did find one thing that you should change that I haven't seen mentioned. On the "Our Services" page under the "Documentation" section there is a grammatical error that you should fix. The second line currently says: "Your provide: nothing." You should change that to read "You provide: nothing."

Good luck to you in your endeavors!

paulbennett2• 9 years ago

In the UK (and I'm sure many other places in the world) rental agencies already provide the services you are describing. As a UK single-family home landlord I ask my rental agency to find me tenants, run background checks, handle deposits, rent and other finances etc. For this I pay them 5-10% of the rental income/month. They will also handle repairs etc. if I need them to and bill me accordingly. This is a great service for me as a landlord who lives abroad because it greatly reduces the amount of time I have to spend dealing with my property to maybe a couple of hours every few months.

Kiro• 9 years ago

Unusable site on mobile (Android, Chrome). Every click and swipe/scroll trigger all these confusing whole page transitions that make no sense. I thought my browser was bugging out at first.

sushobhan• 9 years ago

I love the logo!!! Apart from that, it's a good looking mess where most of the things aren't relevant especially the pictures used. As there are lack of information on the 1st and 2nd fold, most of the traffic might leave before proceeding any further. Scroll jacking is just killing your site. Also for better conversion try to give one CTA on each fold. About content, think who are your target audience and what you want to showcase them, accordingly write your content. All the best :)

paulbennett2• 9 years ago

Why as a renter would I want to use your service over a traditional letting agency? They also provide legal services, handling of finances and often handling of maintenance and repairs etc.

The main difference I see here is using clout as a company to reduce or remove the rent deposit, and as other comments have mentioned some additional concierge services, is that worth an extra fee on top of my rent?

I have rented in the UK before, I am currently a landlord in the UK. Filling in paperwork, providing references etc. isn't particularly difficult or time consuming and I wouldn't pay £99/month myself personally to have that done for me. Maybe a one off fee.

oferzelig• 9 years ago

Site is down now.

Show HN: Tenence – Making Renting Easier

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