While working at a Chicago-based real estate brokerage firm, Melissa Moline noticed a common problem that property management companies continued running into: posting listing to Craigslist was a hassle.
Realizing that the marketing process should be much simpler for property managers, she founded inRentive, a platform that helps real estate professionals manage their content, analyze listing performance, and easily post ads to sites like Craigslist and Facebook.
"One of the biggest pieces in the industry that was missing, and it was a critical piece, is that property management software doesn't really have any way to communicate with front end marketing websites," Moline said .
So Moline set out to create a one-stop-shop where property managers could get out ads faster across a variety of real estate listing websites, in turn saving those companies time and reducing vacancies. inRentive works with the three major property management software companies--Property Solutions, RealPage and Yardi--to get a vast amount of real estate data into inRentive's platform.
Property managers can use inRentive's data, which includes the apartment location, price point, date available, photos and floor plans, to post listings almost instantaneously to Craigslist and other social media sites. inRentive has a one-click Craigslist feature that does 90 percent of the ad creation for the property manager, leaving flexibility to add titles, descriptions, photos and other features on a case-by-case basis.
"We increased closing ratios [for companies] from 20-30 percent to 62 percent in a week," Moline said. "We realized we hit a hot spot in the industry and we kept running with it."
This summer, two years after inRentive went to market, the company was selected to Techstars Chicago, the sought after startup program that gives $118,000 in seed funding and mentorship for 7-10 percent equity in the company. Having a great deal of knowledge about the real estate market in Chicago, the company wanted advice on how to expand inRentive to other markets.
"We wanted to learn more about how to grow and scale the company outside of Chicago and also increase visibility in the tech space," said Moline, who is also the only female CEO in this year's Techstars Chicago class. "We needed to rapidly increase our network, and the best way to do that was to leverage the existing network within Techstars, which is quite honestly the most expansive and exhaustive network in the entire tech community."
The 90-day program is broken up into three parts: expanding your network, execution, and pitching your product for fundraising. inRentive is looking to close a round of funding by the end of September, said Moline, who added that the company reached break even within three months of launch.
"The idea behind inRentive is there weren’t any companies that were focusing on data and accuracy and restoring consumer faith in the industry. And we know that building a content management solution that standardizes and enriches listing content is not a glamorous way to enter the business, but it was a necessary way to enter the business."
Image via inRentive
