Idea: Long term rental platform with detailed applicant information
Airbnb has created a distopyan scenario in many cities, my city included, everybody who comes here and starts looking for an apartment realizes very quickly how hard is it to find one, there is not enough and a significat amount of energy is wasted in the find & interview process.
When I was looking for a apartment I learned I would get a lot more success by sending more information to potential owners (photos, some documents, etc) since they have to sort through (sometimes) hundreds of applicants, current sites in germany are horrible designed and outdated, and the info you give when contacting a potential owner is basically just a text, if you want to add more documentation you have to upload the documents somewhere else and pray they read it.
Enter DOMI, latin for "at home", the sign up progress is fairly long (including a presentation video), but that is so whenever you apply for an apartment the owner already has a lot of information about you, that way a lot of the wasted time is cut, and you only get replies were people are interested in renting you the apartment!
Right now I'm almost stealing Airbnb design 1 by 1, would like to get the idea validated first before changing it. I also know that the market eventually becomes very sales heavy since you need to atract a lot of players to advertise their apartments on the site otherwise the idea is worthless...
Please give me some feedback! I would like to launch the platform first in Germany (since the rental market is hot atm and I also live here).
Hey Oscar! I also had an awful experience to rent my new appartment, therefore I started to validate a very similar idea for the DACH area (Vienna, Austria) last month.
In order to validate my idea, I cold reached out to a ton of people, agents, companies, etc. and concluded interviews based on the principles described in "The Mom Test".
Long story short:
*) Renters would love to have a more efficient rental process. However they rather wouldn't pay for such a service. Hence the other side of the rental platdorm would need to pay your platform.
*) Agents are not very keen to populate a new platform as they are afraid to become obsolete by it eventually. Currently their biggest pain point is the administrative hassle to time-manage prospects and collect all necessary documents from them. (Most of them are not aware of calendly and document collecting tools which would help them.)
*) Institutional landlords do not mind paying an agent to rent their properties since creating the ads and managing prospects by themselves consumes massive internal ressources.
That leaves us with one last player left on the market...
*) Private landlords. To be honest I tried to get in touch via cold mails with many of them, but I gave up in the end. It seems to be very difficult to talk to them and unfortunately I don't have any possibilities for warm introductions. Hence I learned that you'd need a well working acquisition channel, which I imagine to be very costly.
By nature I am very positive and ambitious guy, but I realized that my idea of a longterm rental platform was competing in a "the winner (or few) takes it all" market. Immoscout and other lead gen companies invest a ton of money into their marketing to maintain their pole position to be the relevant platform for both landlords and renters.
If you have any questions to my above learnings, let me know :)
Hey Ewi! that is very insightful! thanks a lot for the feedback!
Yes, like I said I would expect getting owners/managers into the platform would be the biggest challenge, it really becomes a sales problem after you get the basic implementation working.
On the other hand the potential upsides are very clear, from the administrative side for the Agents/owners.
It really is a winer takes all market, just because of the amount of effort needed to compete with the established players, on the other hand maybe it would be interesting as a potential sell to them eventually?
Again thanks a lot for the insights!
I've thought of doing the same in Mexico - the process for finding an apartment was relatively quick compared to other places, but incredibly tedious. And all of it was done via email :facepalm:
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