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Ask HN: please review RentMethod

12 points by mu100 ↗ HN
RentMethod allows landlords/property managers to quickly and easily screen potential tenants by just entering in a tenant’s email address. The tenant verifies their identity and pays for the screen directly, and the landlord/manager receives a detailed report (credit score, background check, eviction notices, etc).

We would love to hear what the HN community thinks of what we’ve built. With limited UI/UX expertise in-house, we hacked together the front-end of the application and would certainly appreciate some feedback for future direction.

http://www.rentmethod.com

Thanks in advance for taking the time to check out our stuff!

11 comments

[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 34.2 ms ] thread
breck
If I'm a perspective tenant and fill out the form for one apartment, do I have to do it again if I apply to another property that also uses rentmethod?
mu100
Currently, every tenant application is specific to a single property and landlord, as income-to-rent ratio and other property specific data is used as part of the rental recommendation. This would certainly be a value-add feature for the tenant and is something we will look into for the future. Thanks for taking the time to look through our site!
geekytenny
Beautiful UI
mikeburrelljr
The target="_blank" on your top nav links makes me want to throw my monitor at the wall. Don't force the users interaction with your website.
mjs00
What might be cool is if I can direct my prospective tenant to you to fill out a digital version of my rental application (standard form), then I get a copy of that 'signed' application, and how they answered all the questions on rental history, employment history, references, key questions on bankruptcy, felonies, etc, as well as your credit screening result.

Otherwise it seems I'm still managing a paper-based application for the info I need, then applicant has to redo part of that effort directly with you to get the credit screen.

mu100
That integration would be cool and certainly time saving. We'll look into it for sure. Thanks for your thoughts!
dgunn
This is an awesome idea.

I’m not a landlord and have no use at all for this, but I really like it so I’ve decided I’m qualified to weigh in. Instead of being specifically designed for landlords, you should be more agnostic about who uses it. There are many reasons to screen people. You probably have horizontal expansion built into your future plans already, but I wouldn’t sit that idea long as it is basically usable to other markets already, it’s just not easy for them to find because they won’t be typing anything about rental property into google.

I think your FAQ comes off as a bit greedy. It should focus on answering questions about the service not recommending policy to individual landlords. See the following:

Q: "Whom should I screen?" A: "EVERYONE"

At worst this reads as, "Send people here to give me money." At best it’s unsolicited advice on how to run my business. There's nothing wrong with wanting money for your service, but don’t punish the readers by slipping things like this into FAQ’s. If I’m there to read about RentMethod, it’s likely that I already have an idea of who I should screen.

mu100
Thanks for the kind words. Good point on horizontal expansion - I think our name might limit us for now ;)

Also, we certainly agree with your point on the FAQ and will address it soon. Thanks again!

joshuacc
Really great job overall. One minor issue with the accept/reject buttons on the report.

When you hover over the buttons, they appear grayed out. This may be an intentional way of signaling that you can't actually perform those actions. But if not, I'd encourage you to just use a different shade of red/green.

mu100
Thanks for catching that. I'll look into it.