Fight the Power! Zeb Dropkin, founder of RentHackr

Zeb Dropkin is the founder of RentHackr, a young and exciting New York based startup that seeks to disrupt the local rental market. To use RentHackr, log in with your Facebook account, enter in some details about your apartment and lease, and RentHackr allows you to see all other submitted rent rates and lease expirations. If you’ve ever rented in New York, you know how much of a pain it is. Because I never want to see another broker’s fee or fake Craigslist ad again, I reached out to ask Zeb about his venture. You can hear more from him at the Renthackr blog, company Twitter handle @RentHackr, or his own Twitter handle @Zeb.

Zeb – thanks for catching up. So, you’ve managed to gather tons of information about rents directly from renters. Besides adding some transparency to the  marketplace, what comes next?

Hey Tim, thanks for your interest and questions about RentHackr. We built the first prototype of RentHackr to test our core assumption: will people give up their lease information in order to join a community where they had access to other members’ lease info? We got a resounding Yes from users that gave over 2,000 leases in our first  month up.

Price transparency was the easiest value proposition for us to start with while testing our hypothesis, so that’s what we focused on. Moving forward, our focus will shift more to delivering value around forecasted availability. We ask users what they plan to do when their lease is up. We take this intent and create a forecast of apartments that will be available and are not yet listed.

There’s obviously a lot of things you could do with the information you’ve gathered, how do you narrow down what’s the next best step for RentHackr?

RentHackr is aiming to change how people search and discover apartment rentals. We want to change to time window from the frantic 3-6 weeks that listings work for to more manageable 2-10 months. The bullets on our landing page represent the primary value propositions we’re focused on testing: plan ahead, track and monitor specific buildings, search apartments over your social network without bugging your friends, and price transparency.

What’s the most interesting thing you’ve learned since you started this?

When we first started out, there was a lot of thought given to statistical significance and a minimum threshold of data before RentHackr would prove useful. We were thinking about it the wrong way. What we’ve found is that users are very forgiving about statistics, and that they can derive great value out of seeing just a few leases near them or in their target area.

What was it about the RentHackr opportunity that convinced you it’d be a good idea to quit what you were doing before and focus on this instead?

I’d been pushing the idea along part time for almost a year when I finally determined that now was as good a time as any, and that I’d never learn and build what I needed to part-time. I believe in the problem, I know there will be solutions to help reduce friction in the rental market… it just became a decision of commitment to try my best to be the one who would execute and deliver the solution.

What’s your strategy for getting people to sign up and buy in?

RentHackr is pretty lucky in that it’s working to reduce the pain in an area where people are agonized. They are eager for a solution so many are already looking for something when they hear about RentHackr. It’s easier to convert people that know they have the pain you’re working to solve. We’ll be focused on getting the product into a better place and pleasing our users in order to drive referrals and word of mouth. We’ll focus on specific neighborhoods and customer segments for marketing pushes.

What, if anything, are you planning for a mobile presence?

I originally conceived of RentHackr as a mobile app. I want users to be able to pull out their phone and see what apartments cost around them wherever they are, and star a building they want to track. What I learned along the way was that coding on the web is still way less risky, less expensive, and easier to iterate on. Once RentHackr proves itself as a product, we’ll absolutely look at testing on mobile.

The New York renting scene has been primed for disruption forever. Why will Renthackr succeed where others have failed?

As a co-organizer of the New York Real Estate Technology Startups meetup, I think there are a lot of great companies working to evolve the real estate experience. RentHackr in particular is taking a fresh approach, I think, in bypassing all of the traditional listings market and choosing to create a new community marketplace for apartments. Time will tell if our way will prove a winner.

What, if anything, are you planning on doing for homeowners?

RentHackr wants to help people track and improve their living spaces over time. Many renters eventually consider buying or become buyers. We’d like to be there for our users and help them calculate when and where it may be good for them to consider buying. For the most part, transparency already exists in the RE sales market, so RentHackr is not focused on serving that market. A friend of ours, Doorsteps.com, is taking on redesigning the home buying experience. Keep an eye on them.