January 11, 2012 at 03:10Die agent, die!
Every year, for the first time in their life, thousands of people are faced with the need to rent an apartment. Honestly, the real estate rental business is still crap, especially in a big city like Moscow. For this reason, every year there is another young man with "burning eyes", who gives out another supers super project of assistance in finding a rental.
These designs are very similar to butterflies. They appear in the hot summers during the high season, and die in the frosty cold . Like butterflies, they flap their wings beautifully and uselessly and disappear without leaving a trace. Why is this so? Some thoughts are set forth below.
To begin with, it is worth saying that due to some circumstances for more than 10 years I periodically have to rent and rent apartments. I do this both for myself and help my friends. Unlike, perhaps, 90% of the Habr audience, which observes the process from only one side, I see it from both. But in this post I will not talk about the intricacies of the hiring or handing over process, but I will talk about the points that the authors of such startups do not take into account.
So, what does the author of the next “agent killer” think about? Faced with this specific business and drank the initial portion of crap (sometimes with the loss of a certain amount of money), our enthusiast comes to the following conclusions:
Accordingly, a “brilliant idea” is born:
Such ideas are especially to the liking of web developers who have gotten their hands on websites about something and parsers for something.
This circuit is completely unsustainable! I will try how I can explain why so.
The most important property of the hiring market is that it is a “seller” market in life, simply speaking, options for people with excellent characteristics at low prices will not be enough for everyone. This means that competition and scarcity arise, and where scarcity always occurs manipulation.
From the point of view of the employer, the main criterion for the quality of the information resource is the amount of primary information. The more ads are published on Site A for the first time, the more likely it is to grab the bird of happiness by the tail. The resources that generate the primary stream are extremely small, in fact there are only a few of them - Winner, Cyan, Hand in Hand, as well as the sites of large agencies exhibiting exclusive. There is also a special category - forums of residential complexes, mainly in the suburbs, where apartment owners write directly.
What is our project? Our project operates exclusively with secondary information. In fact, it adds a time lag between the publication of an advertisement and its copying, i.e. worsens the most necessary criterion for the user - the speed of reaction.
By applying a filter, our startup is guided by his inner conviction about what the necessary information is. By uploading too many ads, the resource gives the impression of another useless crowded govnosayt. If you cut too much, then the site turns into a boring uninformative resource. Ideally, the user should state as much as possible all his wishes for the future apartment and calmly wait for the proposal, but this is impossible!
99% of users will never in their life be able to find an option for their Wishlist, simply because they are not real. Agents post ads-temptations than form Wishlist, but the same agents themselves are engaged in the "treatment" of patients who turn to them. And, by the way, they "treat" especially gifted landlords. Alas, these are the laws of this genre! But an impassive search program will not lead to the intersection of the sets of supply and demand because in real life it does not intersect without “treatment”!
The second important property of the rental marketlies in the dominance of agents in it. Why it happens? Since the seller dictates his requirements, then all services for him are obtained free of charge. The uniqueness of the Russian situation is that the typical owner of the apartment is not a very educated and not very well-off person who is easily led by a smiling agent about the "guarantee of legal purity of the transaction", or a piece of paper with a contract. Do you want to invite him to fill out a form on the website? Dismiss
Understanding that a potential tenant can use the service is a blessing! But the very idea that agents need to be discarded is ridiculous precisely because of the structure of this market. In addition, the entire real estate sector is the science of LOCATION. Most stable, respectable rental customers primarily choose a place - district, street, house. If you offer them the right option, then they will be ready to pay a normal commission. But those who do not want to pay an extra penny at all costs are bad customers even for the site, at least for the agency, at least for the landlord. I’m telling you this as a landlord.
In fact, for all my criticism of such projects, I’ll say that the Internet has a catastrophic lack of a proper rental site. What should it be like? To begin with I will give out theses!
A successful rental site does not sell rental information !
Successful rental site selling TRUST !
A useful rental site does not consider a tenant as a client !
A useful rental site is seen by the client as a landlord! !
A competent rental site does not destroy other people's information with filters !
A competent rental site creates your information !
Dear rental siteDo not fight with professional market participants - agents !
A reputable rental site creates new tools for all
Ebay members to sell products competing with millions of sellers?
No, Ebay, sells trust and information about sellers and goods.
In any industry where there is a demand for trust, it is possible to create a new ebay!
The text below is provided as an outline, I do not even want to discuss its points or typos. I just want to start a positive thought activity that will help give birth to useful ideas.
The site should create added value from the interaction of participants.
Since the client is a landlord, first of all, you need to take care of the interface for the most convenient way of maintaining information about the property. By the way, the Winner base in this sense completely sucks and anachronism!
To assess trust, you can use the huge achievements of payment systems and social networks. A registered member must have a reputation and verification. Reputation builds up from early actions and reviews. Verification is accumulated by the provision of personal information, for example, a scan of the certificate of ownership for the landlord and a scan of the passport with a residence permit for the tenant (this is the highest form of verification, you can think of others). Actually paid verification of agents is one of the revenue items.
Absolute privacy required! For unregistered users, minimal information about the option is available, for verified users, it is proportional to the verification level. This will save a little from lovers of parsing. Let parsed ads with hidden contacts.
Very often, the landlord wants to see the nationality and appearance of the tenant. Therefore, the step of verification can also be the loading of a photograph.
Good options often go away with higher prices, the site should provide an opportunity to conduct fair trading. The transaction should be fixed by a third party - the site.
One of the advantages of electronic verification is the ability to print already completed contracts. A set of contracts can be sold unfilled to anyone who wants rubles for 100-300, or included in the transaction between the tenant and the landlord automatically generating a ready-made document. The content of the contract is half the service that the field agent provides! Sitting and waiting when he scribbles all the data with a pen is a rather boring task for both sides.
The most lethal features of the project may be futures contracts. For a professional landlord, a good customer’s congress and the search for a new one is always associated with direct financial losses due to apartment downtime. And here you can conduct a transaction in electronic form on a given date. The guarantee will be an insurance deposit, which the tenant will make in the form of security, and the service will receive its commission from this amount. In addition to landlords, nonresident tenants will be happy.
Perhaps the key moment of attracting customers - landlords, is the officially declared opportunity for the landlord to receive a commission bonus for the transaction. If in the case of an agent for a landlord, everything happens without difficulty and for free, and the agent receives a commission of 50-100%, then when using the service, the landlord does all the work himself, it is fair that he can get the agency commission 10-20%. This commission may be charged at the highest level of verification from a potential tenant and the site will also receive its percentage. This moment creates a unique offer in relation to offline business methods and can dramatically redraw the principles of business.
I think that it is quite obvious how such a commission can become a source of extra money for private brokers because, for example, they will come to take a picture and fill out an application with some grandmother in the system. With the proper business skills, you can come up with and promote an entire online agency with a network of new generation agents. And such a project will definitely not want to be thrown off in January, because in the spring there are “other plans”.
A small addition with analytics
Yandex search statistics for Moscow for the month. 342 thousand people are looking for an
apartment .
To rent an apartment is looking for 92 thousand people.
The offer covers the demand by 27%, in other words, out of four people who want to take off, physically only one can. The agent’s job in the interests of the owner is actually sending 3 out of every 4 applicants to yuh. This is a harsh reality, the typical number of participants to watch is 4.
The turnover of the agent business is approximately 92,000 * 10,000 = ~ 1 billion rubles a month!
This billion can be scattered as follows: a
quarter goes away - ZP agents a
quarter costs to attract and search for objects the
rest - costs and profits
Unfortunately, almost none of the commentators think that the main cost structure of Agencies / Agents is mass advertising. Hundreds of sites on the Internet, dozens of pieces of paper at each entrance, each house of every street offline. Each agent maintains hundreds of addresses, calling them regularly after the expiration of the contracts. All this work costs money.
And I think that having tuned in to positive thinking, you can come up with something attractive for those 92 thousand landlords who used the Internet to solve this issue and earn honest 10-100 million per month from transactions.
These designs are very similar to butterflies. They appear in the hot summers during the high season, and die in the frosty cold . Like butterflies, they flap their wings beautifully and uselessly and disappear without leaving a trace. Why is this so? Some thoughts are set forth below.
Introduction
To begin with, it is worth saying that due to some circumstances for more than 10 years I periodically have to rent and rent apartments. I do this both for myself and help my friends. Unlike, perhaps, 90% of the Habr audience, which observes the process from only one side, I see it from both. But in this post I will not talk about the intricacies of the hiring or handing over process, but I will talk about the points that the authors of such startups do not take into account.
Typical startup
So, what does the author of the next “agent killer” think about? Faced with this specific business and drank the initial portion of crap (sometimes with the loss of a certain amount of money), our enthusiast comes to the following conclusions:
- Most open source offers are shit
- Sometimes grains of happiness come across
- Most live offers go through agents who withdraw for nothing
- Sometimes particles of live offers without agents come across
Accordingly, a “brilliant idea” is born:
Давайте ка сделаем проект, который соберет информацию из всех источников, обработает ее умными алгоритмами, отсеет лишнее, уберет предложение агентов и выдаст лучшие варианты благодарному посетителю. А тот, в свою очередь, кликнет на баннер и все будут счастливы.Such ideas are especially to the liking of web developers who have gotten their hands on websites about something and parsers for something.
Typical result
This circuit is completely unsustainable! I will try how I can explain why so.
The most important property of the hiring market is that it is a “seller” market in life, simply speaking, options for people with excellent characteristics at low prices will not be enough for everyone. This means that competition and scarcity arise, and where scarcity always occurs manipulation.
From the point of view of the employer, the main criterion for the quality of the information resource is the amount of primary information. The more ads are published on Site A for the first time, the more likely it is to grab the bird of happiness by the tail. The resources that generate the primary stream are extremely small, in fact there are only a few of them - Winner, Cyan, Hand in Hand, as well as the sites of large agencies exhibiting exclusive. There is also a special category - forums of residential complexes, mainly in the suburbs, where apartment owners write directly.
What is our project? Our project operates exclusively with secondary information. In fact, it adds a time lag between the publication of an advertisement and its copying, i.e. worsens the most necessary criterion for the user - the speed of reaction.
By applying a filter, our startup is guided by his inner conviction about what the necessary information is. By uploading too many ads, the resource gives the impression of another useless crowded govnosayt. If you cut too much, then the site turns into a boring uninformative resource. Ideally, the user should state as much as possible all his wishes for the future apartment and calmly wait for the proposal, but this is impossible!
99% of users will never in their life be able to find an option for their Wishlist, simply because they are not real. Agents post ads-temptations than form Wishlist, but the same agents themselves are engaged in the "treatment" of patients who turn to them. And, by the way, they "treat" especially gifted landlords. Alas, these are the laws of this genre! But an impassive search program will not lead to the intersection of the sets of supply and demand because in real life it does not intersect without “treatment”!
The second important property of the rental marketlies in the dominance of agents in it. Why it happens? Since the seller dictates his requirements, then all services for him are obtained free of charge. The uniqueness of the Russian situation is that the typical owner of the apartment is not a very educated and not very well-off person who is easily led by a smiling agent about the "guarantee of legal purity of the transaction", or a piece of paper with a contract. Do you want to invite him to fill out a form on the website? Dismiss
Understanding that a potential tenant can use the service is a blessing! But the very idea that agents need to be discarded is ridiculous precisely because of the structure of this market. In addition, the entire real estate sector is the science of LOCATION. Most stable, respectable rental customers primarily choose a place - district, street, house. If you offer them the right option, then they will be ready to pay a normal commission. But those who do not want to pay an extra penny at all costs are bad customers even for the site, at least for the agency, at least for the landlord. I’m telling you this as a landlord.
Properties of the correct project
In fact, for all my criticism of such projects, I’ll say that the Internet has a catastrophic lack of a proper rental site. What should it be like? To begin with I will give out theses!
A successful rental site does not sell rental information !
Successful rental site selling TRUST !
A useful rental site does not consider a tenant as a client !
A useful rental site is seen by the client as a landlord! !
A competent rental site does not destroy other people's information with filters !
A competent rental site creates your information !
Dear rental siteDo not fight with professional market participants - agents !
A reputable rental site creates new tools for all
Ebay members to sell products competing with millions of sellers?
No, Ebay, sells trust and information about sellers and goods.
In any industry where there is a demand for trust, it is possible to create a new ebay!
Project implementation example
The text below is provided as an outline, I do not even want to discuss its points or typos. I just want to start a positive thought activity that will help give birth to useful ideas.
The site should create added value from the interaction of participants.
Since the client is a landlord, first of all, you need to take care of the interface for the most convenient way of maintaining information about the property. By the way, the Winner base in this sense completely sucks and anachronism!
To assess trust, you can use the huge achievements of payment systems and social networks. A registered member must have a reputation and verification. Reputation builds up from early actions and reviews. Verification is accumulated by the provision of personal information, for example, a scan of the certificate of ownership for the landlord and a scan of the passport with a residence permit for the tenant (this is the highest form of verification, you can think of others). Actually paid verification of agents is one of the revenue items.
Absolute privacy required! For unregistered users, minimal information about the option is available, for verified users, it is proportional to the verification level. This will save a little from lovers of parsing. Let parsed ads with hidden contacts.
Very often, the landlord wants to see the nationality and appearance of the tenant. Therefore, the step of verification can also be the loading of a photograph.
Good options often go away with higher prices, the site should provide an opportunity to conduct fair trading. The transaction should be fixed by a third party - the site.
One of the advantages of electronic verification is the ability to print already completed contracts. A set of contracts can be sold unfilled to anyone who wants rubles for 100-300, or included in the transaction between the tenant and the landlord automatically generating a ready-made document. The content of the contract is half the service that the field agent provides! Sitting and waiting when he scribbles all the data with a pen is a rather boring task for both sides.
The most lethal features of the project may be futures contracts. For a professional landlord, a good customer’s congress and the search for a new one is always associated with direct financial losses due to apartment downtime. And here you can conduct a transaction in electronic form on a given date. The guarantee will be an insurance deposit, which the tenant will make in the form of security, and the service will receive its commission from this amount. In addition to landlords, nonresident tenants will be happy.
Perhaps the key moment of attracting customers - landlords, is the officially declared opportunity for the landlord to receive a commission bonus for the transaction. If in the case of an agent for a landlord, everything happens without difficulty and for free, and the agent receives a commission of 50-100%, then when using the service, the landlord does all the work himself, it is fair that he can get the agency commission 10-20%. This commission may be charged at the highest level of verification from a potential tenant and the site will also receive its percentage. This moment creates a unique offer in relation to offline business methods and can dramatically redraw the principles of business.
I think that it is quite obvious how such a commission can become a source of extra money for private brokers because, for example, they will come to take a picture and fill out an application with some grandmother in the system. With the proper business skills, you can come up with and promote an entire online agency with a network of new generation agents. And such a project will definitely not want to be thrown off in January, because in the spring there are “other plans”.
A small addition with analytics
Yandex search statistics for Moscow for the month. 342 thousand people are looking for an
apartment .
To rent an apartment is looking for 92 thousand people.
The offer covers the demand by 27%, in other words, out of four people who want to take off, physically only one can. The agent’s job in the interests of the owner is actually sending 3 out of every 4 applicants to yuh. This is a harsh reality, the typical number of participants to watch is 4.
The turnover of the agent business is approximately 92,000 * 10,000 = ~ 1 billion rubles a month!
This billion can be scattered as follows: a
quarter goes away - ZP agents a
quarter costs to attract and search for objects the
rest - costs and profits
Unfortunately, almost none of the commentators think that the main cost structure of Agencies / Agents is mass advertising. Hundreds of sites on the Internet, dozens of pieces of paper at each entrance, each house of every street offline. Each agent maintains hundreds of addresses, calling them regularly after the expiration of the contracts. All this work costs money.
And I think that having tuned in to positive thinking, you can come up with something attractive for those 92 thousand landlords who used the Internet to solve this issue and earn honest 10-100 million per month from transactions.