Problem

Too much of a landlord’s job is still done manually. With all the power of modern web technologies, why are landlords still conducting in-person phone interviews? Writing leads’ contact information on slips of paper? Driving to the bank to deposit paper checks?

Approach

With NowRenting, Cyber Care prioritized ease of use from the very beginning. Landlords don’t have a lot of time to spare learning a complicated system; so the design was relentlessly tested against a high standard for simplicity.

Solution

NowRenting started as a simple application with a straightforward purpose. It gave landlords a phone number and email address to use to talk to renters. That way, they didn't have to give out their personal contact information. Just that one feature has saved landlords countless hours of hassle. But it didn’t stop there.

User demand soon fueled the addition of new features. Concrete feature requests from real landlords were hard to ignore, and the app grew and grew. But despite the huge variety of features, NowRenting has never wavered from the original commitment to reducing the amount of complexity users have to deal with; never increasing it.

The Process

When the growing user base pushed NowRenting to the end of what’s possible in a single Lightsail instance, the team had to find ways to upgrade performance without breaking the bank. Clever code rewrites were one way forward, but the team also re-engineered the technology stack to make strategic use of AWS: using CloudWatch and SQS in conjunction with Lambda’s serverless architecture enabled a setup that’s both economically and computationally efficient.

The Result

NowRenting would ultimately become a one-stop destination for almost any feature a landlord or leasing agency could want. It manages the whole listing syndication process, re-posting vacancy advertisements to more than a dozen major websites. It manages leads, enabling communication over different mediums from one simple dashboard. And it handles leases as well, keeping track of important dates, rent payments, lease terms and more.