Launch HN: Propify (YC W23) – Property Management System API Aggregator
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!
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[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 118 ms ] threadI'm just curious what this would be used for. Maybe user story style - as <who> I would be able to <what>.
- 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.
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.
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.
""" 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....
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.
Look them up
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.
What systems do you support? I couldn't find a list anywhere.
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.).
Recommend updating that screenshot!
Now I'm interested.. will submit work email. I'm head of product at RealINSIGHT
I read this as "Rently Ticks". Not a great name!
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.
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.
I wish you had a page listing which vendors you currently integrate with. I was able to find it in the docs though, eventually.
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.
I'm the CTO of https://obeyo.com and integrations are a huge thing for us.
Our current integrations include Yardi, RealPage, Entrata, Propertyware, Buildium, Rent Manager and Rentvine. On the roadmap are Appfolio, MRI and ResMan.
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
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.
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 :)_
Best wishes to you all with the startup.
Good to know you’ll be here a year from now when we move next!!