I'm one of the guys who started RentHop and was pleasantly surprised to get a mention in the OP article, hehe.
When we started RentHop over 6 years ago, we had the same idea. Open table style scheduling for showings, and that brokers were worthless middlemen that should have gone extinct at least a decade ago.
One of the best pieces advice we got during Y Combinator was Paul Graham telling us to go out to NYC and be brokers for a few weeks, if only to confirm a broker adds no value and figure out the easiest parts to automate away. After personally showing apartments nonstop for a month (and losing a lot of weight), we quickly discovered the great brokers are adding lots of value and we completely pivoted the model (the short answer is great rental brokers earn 10x a mediocre broker, so there must be SOME skill involved... in sales the dispersion is 100x or higher).
Of course, that was 7 years back and maybe enough has changed: landlords do more of their own marketing now, smart phones and on-demand apps are even more pervasive, brokerage firms are in more turmoil than before, agents are more tech savvy, etc. Urban Compass tried to pull it off 2 years ago, but they decided to go for the bigger sales market.
I wish Oliver luck, they are technically competitors, but I've always wanted to see online scheduling work for real estate and to date no one has cracked it sufficiently well.
When we started RentHop over 6 years ago, we had the same idea. Open table style scheduling for showings, and that brokers were worthless middlemen that should have gone extinct at least a decade ago.
One of the best pieces advice we got during Y Combinator was Paul Graham telling us to go out to NYC and be brokers for a few weeks, if only to confirm a broker adds no value and figure out the easiest parts to automate away. After personally showing apartments nonstop for a month (and losing a lot of weight), we quickly discovered the great brokers are adding lots of value and we completely pivoted the model (the short answer is great rental brokers earn 10x a mediocre broker, so there must be SOME skill involved... in sales the dispersion is 100x or higher).
Of course, that was 7 years back and maybe enough has changed: landlords do more of their own marketing now, smart phones and on-demand apps are even more pervasive, brokerage firms are in more turmoil than before, agents are more tech savvy, etc. Urban Compass tried to pull it off 2 years ago, but they decided to go for the bigger sales market.
I wish Oliver luck, they are technically competitors, but I've always wanted to see online scheduling work for real estate and to date no one has cracked it sufficiently well.