Startup rental website takes on Craigslist

http://www.reuters.com/article/deborahCohen/idUSTRE5972LK20091008

by drm237 • 17 years ago

55 30 17 years ago

coglethorpe5• 17 years ago

My first (only) startup was a rental site. RentHop already has more traction than I ever did. At the time I knew little about funding or how startups worked. Heck, I didn't really even know much PHP or CSS, but got a site up and running. With little to no funding, I decided to close up shop, which was sad, because we did have real listings coming in, just not enough revenue to cover costs.

I will say that I learned a LOT about coding, which has helped me on my day job and a lot about startups which will help me enormously, should I do it again.

What would I do differently?

- Try to get more seed money. I was working with about a $100 total. I would go with one like Shotput Ventures in my current Atlanta home, or YC if I could swing living in SV for three months. I could use the funds for stuff like the PR that got them this article. I'd get advice and connections to hopefully get that next round of funding, if I need it.

- Take a city-based approach. I tried to to the whole USA at once. It's a lot of territory to cover.

- Get a technical co-founder. I partnered with someone who had a little real-estate experience, but couldn't help out on the tech side. I personally need someone who could really handle the UI design and make something that looks pretty and is dead-simple to use.

- Pick a better name. Seriously. I'm not even going to tell you the name we picked because it was unmemorable, unpronounceable, difficult to spell, and lacked even a hint of SEO-keyword-mojo.

All those lessons, and the tech skills I picked up will help me greatly If I try this again. You know I wouldn't be here if I wasn't thinking about it. ;-)

If PG is reading, what made you/YC decide to fund yet another rental listing site? I'm kind of surprised to be honest. It's been done and has the biggest competitor out there.

iron_ball• 17 years ago

Strikes me as obvious. Everyone says Craiglist is the triumph of "worse is better," but the fact is that Craigslist is pretty bad. Maybe its competitors just haven't been offering the right kind of better.

coglethorpe5• 17 years ago

You make a good point there. I've had my problems with selling items on CL. The thing is, it's got so much traffic, that it is hard to get even a sliver of it to go my way. CL also may be ugly in one sense, but I get the impression that they really do listen to their users.

Then there's the whole second tier of rental sites, such as eBay's rent.com, apartments.com, rentals.com and more. They are usually pretty to look at, but I found all their UIs to be difficult to use. That's where I took a simpler approach to search that I thought users would like better. Still, they get hits and engage in fierce search engine battles.

I still think there has to be a way to connect renters with rentals that's easier than what's out there. I do like rentHop's design at first glance as well. I do wish the rentHop team success. Anything that makes life easier is great.

look_lookatme• 17 years ago

I appreciate what RentHop is doing and I really hope they succeed, but there is going to come a point where ad QA is going to become a concern and then they will really start to feel the pain of building a rental site, especially in NYC.

coglethorpe5• 17 years ago

Heh, I knew my site was on the map when spammers found it. :-)

I learned about scams that hit renters and landlords, but thankfully I got rid of them fast.

Also, people posting would either not capitalize anything or leave the CAPS LOCK key on. Spell checking their own ads was just too much to ask. That struck me as very odd, because I thought they would try their best to make it right to get a unit rented. I just let them post what they wanted as long as it seemed like a legit listing.

ordinaryman• 17 years ago

..It's been done and has the biggest competitor out there.

The following is item #25 from http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html

25. A Craigslist competitor. Craiglist is ambivalent about being a business. This is both a strength and a weakness. If you focus on the areas where it's a weakness, you may find there are better ways to solve some of the problems Craigslist solves.

joshwa2• 17 years ago

It always drove me nuts that craigslist's searches didn't have more structure/parameters to them. Big points for not accepting brokers, too.

A few small interaction notes/feature requests:

  * why can't I search by square footage?

  * need to add lots more parametrized amenities (garden, dogs ok/cats ok, balcony,
    central a/c, furnished, etc)

  * need to search on brooklyn neighborhoods! park slope != bed-stuy.

  * when I click on a map pin, i'd expect to either get a modal dialog with more
    info, or to be taken directly to the listing page. Just showing me a single
    search result is a little unexpected and not especially useful.

  * If I click Browse to go back to search, my last search parameters/results 
    should be retained

  * the chat widget on the community page isn't loading for me (FF 3.5/OSX)

  * The "Oct Deals" link is really cool, but doesn't really tell me what I'm 
    about to see. Also, at the top of the linked-to page, it says September. 

  * Why a different UI for the amenities search-- add button vs. checkboxes?

PS need a product manager?

PPS: I really need to submit a patch to the HN code to do list formatting

windsurfer• 17 years ago

I think craigslist just needs a decent API. That way you'll get all the listings in one central location, and still get decent search possibilities.

mediaman• 17 years ago

Any idea why Craigslist is so vehemently opposed to either providing an API, or allowing others to scrape their site for data?

It doesn't seem to align with many of their other principles of openness.

joe_the_user• 17 years ago

You know, to actually have a feature like search by square footage or some other quantity usable, you would not only have to have that field but train every user to enter that field in the form. And that's not going to happen.

The user will paste in whatever they're written already for the description and put random stuff in the extra fields. Especially when it's a Realtor/broker/etc - they want a listing to include the good stuff but not have to say anything about the bad stuff (including that it's doesn't have XYZ). The Realtor speak that seems to pollute newspapers and craigslist only seems like a disaster to us. In reality, it is a finely tuned system combining communication and non-communication that has arisen over the years.

Craigslist is the victory of "good enough to understand", which is exactly how human natural language works. The continuous Craigslist complaints here are about "it should be up to my ideal" are about not getting that "good enough" is the way that people prefer to communicate - with added ambiguity often being prized by at least one of the communicators - notice how job search ads generally work the same work (the number of Palo Alto locations I've gotten when I've searched for San Francisco on Dice.com isn't any more coincidental than craigslist's disfunction and Dice.com is only paid ads).

joshwa2• 17 years ago

Oh I agree, especially in the context of craigslist. However in RentHop's situation I view it a little differently--you're not getting 50,000 crazy brokers fresh from their license exams inputting stuff, instead it comes from the RE management companies who can be expected to do a slightly better job of things.

Also, I only asked about it once I saw that 4/5 listings I looked at on RentHop actually had that field filled in!

leelin2• 17 years ago

Great feedback. Square footage data is a bit too unpopulated for us to feel comfortable allowing that search (same with breaking up Brooklyn, sadly).

Your other points are very valid. The map behavior in the "search map" mode seems to be more popular, so we'll keep that in mind as we revamp browse listings mode.

drp• 17 years ago

Seems like a rather sensationalist headline. Craigslist is not the competitor, these guys: http://www.google.com/search?q=no+fee+rentals+nyc are.

coglethorpe5• 17 years ago

First of all, yes, it's another link bait headline.

Initially, those are the competitors for sure. But They are already on the first page for the query you listed, so they've go that going for them.

runinit• 17 years ago

Agreed, I went to find a nice apartment in Toronto and realized that it only caters to New Yorkers. Craigslist allows me to find almost anything ANYWHERE.

byrneseyeview• 17 years ago

They're still missing a huge opportunity: RentHop actually ranks better on Google for less targeted searches. For example:

    Search Query                    Ranking
    new york no fee listings        26
    nyc apartment search            30
    new york apartment map          14
    east village apartments         69
    west village no fee listings    53
    apartments in chelsea           not in top 200

You can be pretty sure that someone who looks for "apartments in New York" is less ready to buy than someone who looks for no-fee listings in the West Village.

Part of the problem is that the search page is dynamically generated; neighborhood-specific landing pages would help capture those more targeted queries.

coglethorpe5• 17 years ago

> Part of the problem is that the search page is dynamically generated; neighborhood-specific landing pages would help capture those more targeted queries.

Yes, yes and yes. SEO matters for almost every site, but it is a really big deal for this kind of site. I tweaked the internal SEO of my site to highlight and description (One Bedroom Apartment in Newark, New Jersey) of the listing and it paid off for those "long tail" searches.

ryanfitz2• 17 years ago

The manhattan neighborhoods need to be broken up more, I immediately noticed these missing soho, lower east side, chinatown, nolita, greenwich village, and hells kitchen.

leelin2• 17 years ago

Interesting feedback. Did you try the "search map" mode?

We've struggled with a good middle ground between having all the different sub-neighborhoods vs. simply allowing people to go to where they want to live by browsing on a map.

ryanfitz2• 17 years ago

In new york different neighborhoods vary greatly and most people have a very specific neighborhood they are interested in looking. I personally love living in soho and would not be interested in looking at a different area to live, even greenwich village which is just 3blocks from me I would not be interested in. I know I'm not alone in this as most of my friends all have a specific neighborhood that they want to live in. I think being able to break down the results to more neighborhoods is a needed feature.

zepolen• 17 years ago

Might want to aggregate listings when zoomed out. I made a site like this for fun (getting to know google maps) for Greece: http://www.plot.gr/properties/map?lang=en

weeksie• 17 years ago

Exactly, how can they leave out the LES and SoHo? It's not like those are marginal or border-neighborhoods. That struck me as a very odd decision.

awt• 17 years ago

I would really like to see some serious craigslist competitors. There are basic things that craigslist refuses to allow users to do, like keep a list of things they're interested in.

fjabre• 17 years ago

Really nice app.. Anybody know what tech this was implemented in..?

databus• 17 years ago

"RentHop is free to browse and to post listings, but landlords are charged half a month's rent for every signed lease the website helps bring in."

Anyone know how you would enforce this? Seems like it would be easy for landlords/renters to circumvent the charging process.

bk• 17 years ago

I'm also really curious how renthop works in that regard.

I've thought about similar businesses, and avoiding being cut out always seems like a hard-to-solve problem.

I would really appreciate if you guys could give an explanation without me having to rent a place to test-drive the process. :)

bravura• 17 years ago

How does RentHop ensure that they get their half-month rent from the landlord? i.e. how do they make sure that they know if they successfully connected a renter and a landlord to sign a lease?

Startup rental website takes on Craigslist

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