Saying Hello to new renters

One of the more unique aspects of this year’s Future Midwest Conference was Funded by Night.  The basic premise was to have startup companies compete in a business pitch competition for the chance to win an investment of $100,000 from Detroit Venture Partners.  25 companies competed for the prize in Shed 5 of Detroit’s Eastern Market.

The ideas ranged from a simplified inventory management system for small restaurants to a high school sports channel run by student journalists.  Winning the competition was a company called Gumshoe that gives a geo-location angle to a mystery game.  Think Clue with a live Foursquare element.

While these were all interesting ideas, the one that caught our eye was Hello Rent.  Their idea is pretty simple, give people searching for apartments an easy way to see the services available in the neighborhood they are searching in.  If a property you are interested in is listed, they want to show you where the closest gas station, grocery store and bar is in relation to your potential new home.

The guys behind Hello Rent admit they are still in beta, and because they didn’t win the funding they are doing the work on a shoestring budget outside of their normal day jobs. They’ve done a great job despite that handicap.  What makes the site interesting is how easy it is to search.  The interface for a potential renter is very clean and gives information freshly gleaned from Craigslist and Google Maps.

For property managers, it points to why we need to be in our communities helping businesses around us get registered on local search sites.  The data pulled by Hello Rent is only as good as the information inputted, so if the best Laundromat in your neighborhood isn’t listed, it could mean a potential renter discounts your property.  It also means that we need to be very descriptive in our Craigslist, Rentbits, Multifamilybiz or RentJuice posts, since they pull information about YOUR property from these services.

One of the few glitches we noticed in test-driving the site is with the Craigslist listings they are pulling.  Currently only plain text postings with a few pictures are making through the Craigslist API, so if you use services like VFlyer, you might not get noticed.  This is a hiccup that Brett from Hello Rent says is something they hope to fix soon.  But in the meantime, make sure at least one of your posts each month is plain text.

Will Hello Rent cause a huge flood of traffic for you?  Maybe not, but at least this slick looking site will force us all to be a little tighter on how we describe our communities.

This post originally appeared on the JSDA website May 6, 2011.