Looking for feedback on a rental property app idea

Buying & Selling Real Estate

Looking for feedback on a rental property app idea

Rental Property Investor · San Mateo, CA · Member since 2020 · 11 posts · 1 vote

Hey guys, I am very new to real estate but I am a software engineer by profession. I recently got into real estate and I wanted to invest out of state but I soon realized that good deals go fast and the current process of finding good deals is quite tedious. You have to spend hours out of your day browsing real estate sites, crunching numbers in spreadsheets, and then finally you might find something worthy to look into BUT wait! now it's under contract, UGH! Yes, the frustration is real and very annoying.

So what if there was a website, where you simply provide where you're looking to invest and then it will find all listings in that area that have a good ROI and email them to you as well as if any new listings come out, it will email those to you too. It would also breakdown how it reached that ROI and you can always customize the calculation to your liking so it finds the right match for you. Then you can just visit that listing on Zillow or whatever you like and see if it's worth investing. I actually already built a chrome extension that does the calculation for any listing on Zillow for you and it's on the chrome store already and it's free.

Was wondering what people's thoughts are on this? Would it be useful or not? Personally I would use it myself but I am not sure if others find it useful.

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Aaron K.
Specialist · Riverside, CA · Member since 2015 · 6k+ posts · 3k+ votes
6y
The problem is rental estimates, Zillow's are garbage and unless you are building a brand new model for estimating rental prices that is better than Zillow it just will never be accurate. This is also kind of what Homeunion does already. Another issue is you can never really take repair costs into account so you get fed a bunch of junker houses, that are cheap, but need a ton of work and still aren't priced correctly. I did a variation on this with Redfin data in python and that was my experience.
Is it useful for getting rid of everything that is not even close? Yes but as a halfway decent investor you can do that pretty quickly with your gut anyway. Is it a magic bullet? No you still have variations across neighborhoods that are tough to account for, in my version I ended up blocking out certain neighborhoods by lat and long because they were 55+ or just had poor returns and you get so many conditional if else statements it made the code really messy, not to mention that would be illegal in a commercial setting (redlining).
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Shivam Bhalla
OP
Rental Property Investor · San Mateo, CA · Member since 2020 · 11 posts · 1 vote
6y
Originally posted by @Aaron K.:
The problem is rental estimates, Zillow's are garbage and unless you are building a brand new model for estimating rental prices that is better than Zillow it just will never be accurate. This is also kind of what Homeunion does already. Another issue is you can never really take repair costs into account so you get fed a bunch of junker houses, that are cheap, but need a ton of work and still aren't priced correctly. I did a variation on this with Redfin data in python and that was my experience.
Is it useful for getting rid of everything that is not even close? Yes but as a halfway decent investor you can do that pretty quickly with your gut anyway. Is it a magic bullet? No you still have variations across neighborhoods that are tough to account for, in my version I ended up blocking out certain neighborhoods by lat and long because they were 55+ or just had poor returns and you get so many conditional if else statements it made the code really messy, not to mention that would be illegal in a commercial setting (redlining).

Good points there. Regarding Zillow rental estimates, any recommendations for a more reliable tool? I have used rentometer and it feels pretty good.
As far as the repairs cost you mentioned, totally understand where your coming from but I guess if this was to be built, yes it won't be 100% based on the condition of the property but will give you a rough idea of the possible return on it so you can do your own research once you go to the listing.

Appericate the feedback tho, I'm not very serious about this idea, just wanted to hear peoples thoughts on it.

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Aaron K.
Specialist · Riverside, CA · Member since 2015 · 6k+ posts · 3k+ votes
6y
@Shivam Bhalla even rentometer isn't super accurate, because they mix building types all the time, it takes someone looking at the right comps to get an actual accurate value for rent.

In my version I hard coded

if city-name == "Moreno Valley" and 1500 >sqft >1250:
rent == 1750

I did that for each city and sqft increment I was interested in, if I wanted to be even more specific I might have gone by year built and/ or zip code as well but I was trying to eliminate everything that wouldn't work even in a best case scenario and let my intuition handle the rest.
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Chris Levarek
Real Estate Syndicator · Phoenix, AZ · Member since 2018 · 903 posts · 1k+ votes
6y
@Shivam Bhalla I like it. Find a problem, provide a solution. With any app, there are difficulties in getting the correct data of course not to mention updating that data. However, if it was easy, anyone would do it and it wouldn't be worth much :) I do think you are on to something however, creating apps for visionary real estate investors is and will be highly lucrative.
Just search in Upwork.com the amount of engineers selling services to develop real estate processes, automations or systems (ie. podio, airtable, asana, etc.). And who better an audience then those creating wealth and passive income in real estate.
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Shivam Bhalla
OP
Rental Property Investor · San Mateo, CA · Member since 2020 · 11 posts · 1 vote
6y
Originally posted by @Chris Levarek:
@Shivam Bhalla I like it. Find a problem, provide a solution. With any app, there are difficulties in getting the correct data of course not to mention updating that data. However, if it was easy, anyone would do it and it wouldn't be worth much :) I do think you are on to something however, creating apps for visionary real estate investors is and will be highly lucrative.
Just search in Upwork.com the amount of engineers selling services to develop real estate processes, automations or systems (ie. podio, airtable, asana, etc.). And who better an audience then those creating wealth and passive income in real estate.

Thanks! Actually I can probably build out a working prototype within a month.

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