Property Portals Going Deeper Into Rentals
We can clearly see an increasing trend of rental listing sites moving into management zone
Until a few years ago, the lines of control within the real estate - tech ecosystem was clearly drawn. Property portals (Like Zillow, Magicbricks, etc.) were platforms where brokers, property managers and landlords could list their properties for sale or rental. Once the buyer/tenant showed interest, their information was passed on to broker/landlord to take the transaction offline.
Now, property portals want to play a different game. They want to enable the transaction, and move into the management territory as well.
Over the past 2 years, there has been increasing trend of portals adopting a ‘List -> Screen -> Book -> Collect rent’ strategy towards the rental industry. This is an interesting trend indeed.
Who’s doing it?
In Feb-2020, In it’s quest to serve the rental industry, Zumper launched Zumper Manage - A service for landlords and small property managers. Earlier called Zumper Pro, the company relaunched the product to include tools to list properties, screen tenants, take bookings and collect rent amongst some other features.
Zillow Rental Manager, which was initially launched in 2016, got a Covid boost in 2020 when the company allowed landlords and tenants to e-sign leases through the platform. Today, tenants can view listings, apply to them, sign a lease, and pay rent - All through Zillow without navigating to any other system.
It’s a similar story half way around the world in India as well.
Many of the leading property portals have launched features focussed on the transactional rental industry. While Magicbricks and NoBroker allow landlords to collect rent through their platform.
Are you enjoying this article? Why not share it with a friend or on your social media?! It would help me reach a wider audience :)
Housing.com has gone a step further and launched ‘Edge’ which is an end to end platform for everything including paying rent, signing leases, finding packers and movers, renting furniture and much more.
What does this mean for Property Management Softwares?
The big fish of the property management software business are largely unaffected by this move as most of these tools are in their early days and don’t have the sophistication to attract large property managers and institutional landlords.
Ex. None of the services syndicate their listings across multiple portals, their process for manage maintenance requests are primitive, etc.
Having said that, it’s not too difficult to imagine some of the portals looking to extend their product focus to serve the larger operators over the next few years.
The ones who would be affected in the short term are the softwares focussed on the small landlord segment. Companies like Avail and Cozee, which have traditionally focussed on the bottom of the pyramid can definitely expect to see some impact on their future business due to this.
In recent news, Realtor.com acquired Avail in Dec-2020 to boost it’s offerings to landlords.
2 Predictions In This Regard
I expect to see 2 big shifts in the real estate - tech industry over the next 2 years within this insight.
A large property portal will acquire a medium to large property management software to boost their product portfolio and speed the go-to-market in the enterprise segment. It looks inevitable that å Zillow (or it’s counterpart in other parts of the world) makes a big move in this market
Property portals in EU or APAC, who have not yet moved in this direction will do so. The strategy seems to be working out for companies in US and India, so it looks likely that other will follow this trend
For those unaware, I’m the Founder and CEO of TheHouseMonk - The operating system for rental real estate, and we are front and center in this industry. Hence, I get a ring side view of whatever is happening :)
It’s going to be an interesting few months and years in the rental management domain!
If you have reached till here, it’s seems like you enjoy this newsletter and are getting some value from it :) It would be of immense help to me if you could share this with your colleagues and friends who might also be interested in receiving articles like this!
RealEstateXTechnology is a completely free newsletter, and I would love to have more readers for this service. Do forward the following link to them!