When All Seems Lost in Real Estate, Buffalo Makes Top Ten?

I read an article this morning on Buffalo Rising stating that real estate in the Buffalo Metro Area is on the rise. I was slightly skeptical, only because we were one of the cities in the country that did not experience the burst of the bubble because our home prices have not gone up more than 2-4%. But Buffalo Rising states that CNN Money has listed Buffalo/Niagara region as one of the top ten fastest growing real estate markets currently. Also on the list was Rochester and Syracuse, putting 3 upstate and western new york cities on the list.

My theory is that because the Buffalo/Niagara region has been at a steady real estate price growth for years, that we catch the eye of real estate investors. Investors currently do not want to invest in neighborhoods where home prices have fallen or foreclosures are at risk or eminent. They want to invest in areas where risk is low, prices are stable and climbing and neighborhoods are solid. After thinking about it, I am not so skeptical anymore, Buffalo is a great place to invest in real estate. Lets just hope that this does not lead to our own local real estate bubble!

Progress Update

I wanted to take a moment to tell you how our progress is going. We are on time for our May 15th release! Our May 15th release is going to be a private beta, so if you have not requested access, please visit our website @ http://www.propertystampede.com before we close signups.

What will be in this release?

• Advanced Property Management: You will have the ability to add, edit and delete properties, units, leases and tenants. You will also be able to have thorough accounts of events by utilizing our notes feature, which allows you to document a note on either a property, unit, lease or tenant.


• Full Accounting Records: You will be able to setup your chart of accounts to your needs, view general ledger transactions, enter manual transactions, and create manual invoices. All of your leases will automatically generate the appropriate ledger transactions for rent, security deposits and all other charges to a tenant.


• Tenant Portal: Your tenants will be invited to create accounts so that they can view rent due, their lease details, and submit service requests.


• Document Storage: Our system is designed to allow you to upload images, videos, pdf documents, word documents, excel documents, and more. You can assign these documents to a property, unit, lease or tenant. For example, one of our clients like to have a copy of all of his tenants driver's license. So he can scan it and upload it to either that tenant's record or lease.


• Management Dashboard: When you login, you will be greeted with a management dashboard providing you with a quick snapshot of your businesses statistics and health. For example, on this page will be a widget that displays the top 10 tenants that owe you money, another widget that displays your recent income per month and projected income per month, and more.

Now I realize that the above is not the vision I have portrayed to you all as to all of the features and services that our product will offer. That is because we are working in a fashion where we release our product early and update it often. So with that said, I would like to list the features that will be released in the near future.

• Alerts System: Soon we will be releasing system alerts that you can custom create to alert you or a staff member of specific events. Our alert system can be configured for many different types of events and can be setup to alert you by popping a message to you the next time you login, by email or by cell phone text message. For example, in the event of a priority 1 service request from a tenant, you could have a text message sent to you and your maintenance staff.


• Marketing Components: In the coming weeks you will see the release of our first marketing components. Marketing components to come include:
  
  
  
  • a flyer generation tool,
  
  
  • a classified ad tool (which will help you create listings optimized for sites like craigslist),
  
  
  • a public company profile that lists current promotions and your properties (this profile will be also search engine optimized for the keywords of your choice),
  
  
  • our rental listing engine,
  
  
  • bulk vacancy feeds (some listing engines like citycribs.com offer a user to manage their vacancy ads through what is called a bulk feed, ultimately it is a file that has all of the information about your listings, all you have to do is activate the feed that matches your service provider, then we will give you the link to the feed to provide to the service provider and we will take care of the rest!)
  
  


• Reporting: It will be reporting heaven, including such reports as your rentroll, balance sheet, profit and loss, bad debt, maintenance reports and more (as a beta tester you will help us determine what reports are most important to you). You will even be able to have reports automatically sent to your email inbox daily, monthly, quarterly or annually!


• CRM: Under our "Organize" tab will be an easy to use CRM. Providing you with contacts, tasks, notes, and a calendar.

That is a chunk of the complete vision... One thing that we intend to release but have no timeline for, is the ability to manage and market vacation rentals. So once again, if you have not signed up for our beta, I suggest you do because time is running out and I look forward to seeing you all on the 15th!

Sincerely,
Christopher M Mancini
Co-Founder, Property Stampede LLC

Can Property Stampede Keep You Out of Court?

I think it can! I read Preparing for Court: Landlord/Tenant Disputes on the All Property Management Blog and it discussed how you can avoid going to court when disputes arise. In the article, they say that the key to avoiding court is to maintain good records.

They say to make note of everything in regards to the property and tenant. Keep the notes as long as possible. They also recommend taking photos of the condition of the unit before and after a tenant occupies the property, so that you can back your decision in retaining their security deposit. So how can our online property management application keep you out of court?

Property Stampede allows you to create notes and attach them directly to properties, units, leases and tenants, so if you need to easily document events, problems, and important details that could potentially keep you out of court. Not to mention you have the ability to upload pictures, videos and receipts and attach them to properties, units, leases or tenants. Your tenants also have the ability to view the lease at any time from our web site, so they never have to contact you to view their lease terms.

Ultimately Property Stampede provides property managers and real estate investors with the organizational tools to maintain the proper records that can keep them from having to sit before a judge. I think that is something worth value.

We Have Business Cards and a Logo!

After quite a bit of debate and many revisions, we have finally designed our business cards and our logo.  This is really exciting and we are looking forward to any feedback you may have.

Business Card Front

Business Card Back

Logo

What is most important to you in picking a business application?

We at Property Stampede are trying to determine what drives value in a business application. We would like to think that it is our fashionable appearance or our heart warming personalities that creates value for our end users... but we completely understand if you disagree.

The reason we are trying to determine what drives value, is quite simple really, we want to offer the best possible application to our customers as we can. It helps us little if we do not know what makes our customers really excited about our application. Is it a low price, a large feature list, top notch customer service and support? What makes our customers tick?

Can a company provide a large feature list(1), top notch customer service(2), ease of use(3) and high reliability(4) while still offering it at a low price(5)? In comparison, does WalMart offer all of the above? I would venture to say that they have has 1, 4, and 5. Yet they are rated as one of the best in department retail.

Another example is Apple. They definitely do not have 5, ugh... but they are growing and gaining the affection of the younger elitists in our society. Apple has 2 for sure... I was in the store at the genius bar once and a customer came in with an obviously damaged laptop. He even told them that he had slipped on ice and thrown his laptop 10 feet in the air. It still worked but the cd-rom had stopped operating. They replaced the cd-rom for him. Astonishing. I think in total they have 2,3,4, and innovation (I forgot to add that one earlier, we will call it 6).

Is a company silly if they try to go after all of the core aspects of creating value? (There is actually terminology for this stuff, but I do not remember it all...) My personal opinion is that it is impossible for a company to focus on all aspects, and if they do, they never achieve greatness. Our goal is to achieve greatness, if thats the case, then where do we spend our time?

My initial thought was a low price, but I am beginning to rethink that. I think that our product is providing much needed innovation in the terms of property management and searching for property to rent. Our goal is also to provide top notch customer focused customer service. I guess ease of use goes hand in hand with customer focused service and development. We also want to be able to guarantee that our product is reliable and that our customers data is safe. Not to mention an all inclusive feature list, full accounting records, document management, crm functionality and powerful marketing components.

So if the above is our vision for our company and its products, can we still offer it at a low price... or better yet should we? Do we price our software to be competitive or do we price our product based off of perceived value? Do we risk having a smaller user base in exchange for higher profit margins per user?

These are the questions we are currently asking ourselves and would love input on the subject.

Thank you,
Chris

Indentured Blogitude?

I was reading Gigaom and learned about Indentured Blogitude. I never knew that something like this could possibly exist, that our society is so hung up on social networking that they would force bloggers to work in such environments and work to death. Its sad.

See the conditions for yourself:

Angry Renter?

I stumbled across AngryRenter.com, which is a cry for government to let our free economy correct itself out, and to not bail out reckless borrowers and irresponsible lenders. The following is an excerpt from their website:

All we hear these days is whining from reckless home borrowers and their banks.

But did you know that renters are 32 percent of American households? And that homes in foreclosure are less than 2 percent?

So why is Congress rushing to bailout high-flying borrowers and their lenders with our tax dollars?

Unfortunately, renters aren't as good at politics as the small minority of homeowners (and their bankers) who are in trouble. We don't have lobbyists in Washington, DC. We don't get a tax deduction for our rent and we don't get sweetheart government loans.

Quite simply, we are just Angry Renters. And now it is our time to be heard: no government bailouts!

They put up a good argument. If you agree with them, navigate over to their sign and sign the petition. The petition will be available to be signed until it is sent to congress on April 21st, so don't waste time.