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Landlord Tools Product Strategy

Justin Raczak
Last edited 197 days ago by Justin Raczak
innovation

Landlord Tools Product Strategy in a Nutshell

We build products, features, and services that attract landlords to RentSpree and help retain them on the platform so they continue to use the services we monetize today, namely Tenant Screening and Rent Payment. Informed by continuous learning about our customers, we also look for opportunities to bundle and package what we build into offerings that are directly monetizable. Rigorous measurement ensures we understand the degree to which our products and features impact our goals of adoption, retention, and monetization.

(WIP)Introduction

Notes
What is a product strategy and why do we need this? This doesn’t prescribe the projects we will do/this is not a roadmap or backlog. Rather, this product strategy is a framework that serves to ensure maximal alignment between stakeholders and team members and empower teams to make smart decisions relative to where we are trying to go as a company and as a product.

✅ The Landlord User and Their Journey

We build products for landlords. A customer-centric approach to product development reminds us that we start from the customer and their problems and work backward to software solutions that can solve those problems or deliver real benefits (time savings, money savings, etc). Let’s take a look at the high-level core jobs of landlords within the scope of RentSpree’s focus.
As a landlord, when I have vacancies at my properties, I need a way to find the best tenants so I can minimize vacancy time.
As a landlord, when I’ve selected tenants for my property, I need a way to get them ready to move in.
As a landlord, when my tenants have moved in, I need a way to collect rent each month so that my financial commitments are met.
As a landlord, when my tenants have an issue at the property, I need a way for them to inform me so I can manage the issue.
As a landlord, when my tenants’ lease is ending, I need a way to extend or wrap up the tenancy so that I can ensure occupancy as seamlessly as possible.
Again, these are high-level jobs, each of which may be comprised of several smaller jobs and therefor multiple product opportunities, but these jobs represent the average lifecycle for our landlord users and illustrate the general shape and scope of our opportunity. We’ve started to deliver value against some of these jobs (primarily 1 and 3), but there is plenty of room to grow in these areas. This is especially true for the parts of the product that were designed specifically for our agent users and may feel unnatural for landlords who are focused on different jobs or jobs that sit within different high-level journeys (i.e. different prior and subsequent steps). We can also see that there are core pieces of the landlord’s journey that we haven’t addressed yet, illustrating ample opportunity to discover new ways to support landlords and generate more affinity for the platform.
(WIP)landlord segmentation (1-4, audience size, etc)
With a general understanding of who our customers are, let’s look at how we position ourselves in the market.

✅ Market Positioning


RentSpree vision: A world where people, rentals, and homes are easily connected.
RentSpree mission: To simplify home renting and create lasting connections among renters, agents, and landlords.
Landlord Tools domain mission: To empower landlords to easily manage and scale their rental business and support their relationships with renters and agents.

The competitive field for software products catering to the needs of landlords is
crowded
⁠
(non-comprehensive list) and is growing more crowded with each passing quarter. While this is a promising sign of the opportunity ($119M raised by competitors listed
below
⁠
in the last 2 years; note: funding data only available for 7 companies), it also means we must be clear-eyed about the position we want to hold in the market, how we will get there, and how we will defend our position once there.
Our work in Tenant Screening has helped us forge brand recognition and trust in this space but we cannot assume this brand capital extends to adjacent offerings or translates to recognition and trust with new customer types such as landlords. We should expect we’ll need to establish ourselves with this new customer segment and that we’ll need to rely on the quality of our products to generate credibility, just as we did with Tenant Screening. Further, we need to recognize that forces beyond our control will shape customer perceptions and impact how we must position ourselves in the market to remain competitive. A failure to recognize shifting market-level requirements will leave our offering deficient in the eyes of customers and lead to a degradation of our market position.
It is also critical we recognize that we cannot dominate the space simply by keeping up with requirements. To be a market leader and build a durable business that will attract private investment or be seen as an attractive opportunity to public markets, we will need to offer a differentiated solution. Differentiation in this case can be achieved through functional differentiation (e.g. unique features and capabilities) or quality of delivery (e.g. faster payout times, vastly superior user experience across an undifferentiated feature set, etc).
A high-level review of competitive feature sets is shown in the
table below
⁠
. We can see that each listed competitor offers a version of our core products (Tenant Screening and Rent Payment). Because we are all leveraging the same underlying data for screening and because the exchange of funds between two parties is straightforward, these products can easily become commoditized and make competition within them difficult and expensive. This is likely one of the reasons we are seeing horizontal expansion of capabilities across the board.
Look to Baselane, a platform offering banking services for landlords, as an illustration of this dynamic. Initially launching only with banking services, Baselane now offers both Tenant Screening and Rent Payment (Tenant Screening in partnership with TransUnion). In fact, the only RentSpree feature Baselane is lacking at this time is rental applications, something that could be built out within a quarter if they made the decision to offer it. And because of their financial service orientation, they offer a superior set of property finance features. This is one example of the increasing intensity of competition in our space.
All this said, it would be a mistake to look at what competitors are doing and assume they are making the right decision, or that the products they’ve decided to launch are driving the desired business impact. So how do we determine the feature set that creates the gravity required to grow the Rent Payment platform? This will be driven by our feature strategy.
Landlord Competitor Features
1
Provider
Tenant Screening
Rental Applications
Listing Syndication
Lead Management
Document Templates
E-Sign
Rent Payments
Document Storage
Maintenance Management
Expense Tracking
Financials
Messaging
Mobile App
Integrations
User Roles
MFA
Subscription
Insurance
1
RentSpree
​
2
Avail
​
3
Innago
Renters
4
RentRedi
Renters
5
TurboTenant
Renters
6
DoorLoop
​
7
Azibo
Renters
Landlord
8
Yardi Breeze
Renters
9
Hemlane
​
10
TenantCloud
​
11
Zillow Rental Manager
​
12
Landlord Studio
​
13
Propertyware
Landlord
14
Rentberry
Renters
15
Baselane
Landlord
Renters
16
Stessa
​
There are no rows in this table
⁠

2024 Mission: answer why should landlords use RentSpree’s products?
⁠

✅ Feature Strategy

edison-bulb

2024 Feature Strategy Mission

Identify the product, feature, and capability set we need to generate enough gravity to attract landlords to the platform and retain them over the long run.
Our feature strategy determines the scope of our products and is massively important as it dictates how we will compete in the market with our existing products. The field of competitors offering both Tenant Screening and Rent Payment has become very crowded and, as
shown above
⁠
, the majority of our competitors are continuing to expand the scope of their products while also
expanding horizontally
⁠
with complementary use cases. A close connection to our landlord users and a steady stream of learning will be critical components in ensuring we are solving the most important problems and at the right time. While competitors are quickly placing markers around the edge of the problem space, we shouldn’t rely too heavily on this signal to drive our prioritization. At the end of the day, our users will tell us the most important problems we can solve for them. The more important the problem we solve, the greater the value to users and the greater the value RentSpree can extract.
We will focus heavily on identifying products and features that deliver recurring value to users as these opportunities will be significantly effective at generating platform stickiness and driving up retention. The more frequently the landlord is engaged with the platform, the more they are reminded of the value we provide and the more opportunities we have to activate them on additional products.
Based on our current products and what we know about the problem space today, our
most immediate opportunities
⁠
lie in helping agents and landlords collaborate (add link to 2024 planning session research) throughout the tenant selection process and elevating the property creation experience to a first-class experience designed for landlords.
⁠
@Justin Raczak
⁠
for some reason I don’t see an option to comment on the table below. I recall you had a more exhaustive list. Recognize this is still WIP but can we link to that other table perhaps as a placeholder?
accuracy
Target Outcomes: Activation Rate, Rent Payment Attach Rate, Monetization Rate, Active Properties
Feature Projects
5
Name
Description
Outcome Focus
Candidate Quarter
1
Collaborative Tenant Sourcing
Support agents and landlords in collaborating throughout the process of finding tenants for vacancies. This could start as early as reviewing listing and marketing materials and continue all the way through finalist review and tenant selection. These workflows could plug directly into e-sign, rent payment, and other important features.
Retention
2024 Q2
2
Enhanced Add Property Flow
Capture more details about the property so we can better automate and operationalize workflows, e.g. is there a listing agent, how will the landlord find tenants, etc
Retention
2024 Q1
No results from filter
⁠
⁠

✅ Growth Strategy

edison-bulb

2024 Growth Strategy Mission

Identify and alleviate the barriers to adoption and reinforce drivers of retention to maximize performance of our existing offerings.
Our growth strategy outlines how we will increase our share of our current addressable market by removing barriers to adoption and activation. We will focus on two primary motions in the near term:
User Flywheels. This focus area is about identifying opportunities to leverage existing users to acquire new users. Some examples are incentivizing listing agents to invite their landlord clients to the platform and encouraging Rent Payment renters who move to invite their new landlords to the platform to collect rent.
Conversion Performance. This focus area is about improving the performance of various weak points in the product experience. This could include click-through on the logged-in Rent Payment page or completion of a Rent Payment setup invitation.
While retention is a critical component in a growth strategy, our most obvious opportunities lie within adoption and activation which is why we will focus there first. There are likely several dead ends in our product journeys which are not monitored today and which likely contribute to our low Rent Payment attach rate of 0.53%. Identifying these dead ends and designing product and communication (e.g. email) experiences to rescue those users will help us maximize the value of the landlord audience we’re already bringing to the platform.

accuracy
Target Outcomes: Activation Rate, Rent Payment Attach Rate, Monetization Rate, Active Properties
⁠
@Justin Raczak
⁠
I think this one below is critical. Do you plan to expand on this concept and strategy here?
Growth Projects
5
Name
Description
Outcome Focus
Candidate Quarter
1
Landlord-Focused Onboarding
A properly guided onboarding experience catering to landlord users, helping them get set up and ready to leverage the value of RentSpree
Conversion
Retention
2024 Q1
No results from filter
⁠
⁠

✅ PMF Expansion

Product-Market Fit naturally degrades over time, driven primarily by
increased competition
⁠
and changing customer preferences. While we have asserted a strong position in the Tenant Screening space, the strength of that position weakens as customers’ expectations change. Competitors continue to push the boundaries of the solution space, eroding the share of the market we command. While our growth strategy
outlined above
⁠
will deliver incremental improvements in our command of market share, the features delivered as part of our Product-Market Fit expansion strategy will create larger step-function improvements to expand our addressable market and provide runway for sustained growth. This work will also improve the defensibility of our position and make it more difficult for competitors to attract our existing users.
⁠
Growth strategy increases market share within current market while feature strategy increases total addressable market.
⁠
⁠
In the near-term, we will focus on horizontal expansion of our landlord tools, delivering products and features for use cases that are complementary to our core products (Rent Payment and Tenant Screening). These aim to solve problems for both core and adjacent users in a sort of customer “cross-sell” motion, selling more use cases to the same users. These products and features make RentSpree an indispensable part of the landlord’s rental business.
A good example of horizontal expansion in the B2B world is Stripe, first offering payments infrastructure but eventually adding adjacent services like Terminal, corporate cards, and Atlas.
accuracy
Target Outcomes: Activation Rate, Rent Payment Attach Rate, Monetization Rate, Active Properties
PMF Expansion Projects
5
Name
Description
Outcome Focus
Candidate Quarter
1
Move-In/Move-Out Documentation
Provide a way for landlords and renters to collaborate on move-in and move-out inspections to create alignment on issues and liability and avoid confrontation. Renters need to document property move-in conditions, maintenance communications, and other rental-related communication/disputes to protect against liability and ensure habitable living conditions. Landlords need to collect & communicate post-application details, such as accommodation needs & move-in details
Acquisition
Retention
2024 Q2
2
Property Requests (Maintenance Requests)
Support workflows for creating requests and communicating about them, e.g. maintenance requests, requests for modifications, etc
Acquisition
Retention
2024 Q1
3
Expense Tracking & Categorization
Landlords need to keep the financial records for their rental properties separate for tax purposes. Income and expenses need to be easily retrieved. Many expenses are tax-deductible. Linking expenses to other objects like maintenance requests might further ease this overhead.
Acquisition
Monetization
Retention
2024 Q2
No results from filter
⁠
⁠



(WIP) Monetization

Monetization Projects
5
⁠
⁠
@Justin Raczak
⁠
do we have any evidence to support home warranty concept? This one feels misaligned to overall vision.
⁠

(WIP) Near-Term Tactics

Backlog, roadmap, tests, research, etc
⁠

Notes

Per-unit pricing, feature/pay wall at complexity level
The longer the loop between paid interactions, the more we’ll have to invest in building out things that are not monetizable to maintain the relationships with customers and ensure we are still well placed to serve them at the next occurrence of the loop.
Race to the bottom - trying to offer software for free and monetizing in other ways. Weak businesses that break the principles of the value exchange system.
Feature/Product Launch Pre-Mortem

(WIP) Goals




Work Still to be Done

There is still some key work to be done that will inform this strategy. It’s left out from this draft to speed delivery time and get discussions started sooner rather than later. This work will likely expand the thinking represented here rather than inform serious changes, so this draft can still safely be considered stable for the purposes of alignment discussions and high-level planning. A few of the known exercises still to be done are listed below.
Medium- to long-term work plan for the domain
Assess S/T scores for existing product(s)/features
Hands-on competitive deep dive — understand whether we are providing differentiated value and where we are deficient in relevant and meaningful ways
Development of a systematic approach to assessing current growth performance and identifying high-leverage opportunities for improvement meant to fuel a backlog of growth experiments
(WIP)Introduction
✅ The Landlord User and Their Journey
✅ Market Positioning
Landlord Competitor Features
✅ Feature Strategy
Feature Projects
✅ Growth Strategy
Growth Projects
✅ PMF Expansion
PMF Expansion Projects
(WIP) Monetization
Monetization Projects
(WIP) Near-Term Tactics
Notes
(WIP) Goals
Work Still to be Done
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