Property Stampede Progress Update

Our programmers are at it again. And this time it is to make your life a little easier as a property manager.

Did you ever get that call at 3am saying the sink was dripping in 36c? I mean come on, it is important to conserve the water and their sleep, but sometimes your sleep is a little more important. That is why we added the newest addition to the tenant section called the “Service Requests” section.

Since our online property management application is open and awake 24/7, your tenant has the ability to log on and record a new service request; even at 3am. The tenant goes on, tells you what is wrong or what the question is, and it logs all the info that they give you. The second that they submit it, you get notified via email with time, date, location, problem or question, priority level and their emotional state. Then you have the ability to post a response and keep them up to date as to what is happening. You once again see what is coming before you have to confront it. Just a little way of bringing you back in the driver’s seat.

This is just one of the new features and modifications that we have been working on this week. And as always, we are using the input that our beta testers have provided us to prioritize what aspects of the application need improvement. Please keep them coming, and remember that if you are a beta tester you can give us your input by submitting a case under the "Support/Case Tracking" tab from your Home / Dashboard.

If you are not yet a Beta tester and would like to become one, sign up for an invitation to the best property management software (At least we think so…)

Are you ready to join the Stampede?

Property Stampede Progress Update

As usual, we are continuing to work to improve and expand our application. We are using the input that our beta testers have provided us to prioritize what aspects of the application need improvement. Please keep them coming, and remember that if you are a beta tester you can give us your input by submitting a case under the "Support/Case Tracking" tab from your Home / Dashboard. This allows you to create and track cases. If you are not yet a Beta tester and would like to become one, signup for an invitation to the best property management software (At least we think so…)

Some of the new and exciting changes that we have made in the past couple of days:

For Tenants:

• A cleaner, newer face to the homepage when you sign into the tenant section.
• Major programming changes that improve the ease and functionality of the portal. This makes it easier for tenants to navigate and use the application.
• A new lease page for tenants to view and manage their lease(s).
• Also soon look for new up-and-coming features on the Maintenance tracking page.
• Tenants are not yet allowed to make payments while in Beta mode, but soon will be able to using Paypal, Google checkout, credit card, and their checking account.

For Property Managers:

• A fun new feature was added this week which allows for your new Tenant(s) to receive a Welcome/Invitation email. This email is generated when you add a tenant to a lease with an email address. From the email, tenants can navigate to PropertyStampede.com so they can link with their landlord and manage their lease(s). When the tenant arrives to the site, they will be asked if they currently have a property stampede account or if they need to create one. Once the tenant logs in or signs up, the tenant can then manage his or her account.
• There have also been some interface changes to the interface to improve ease of use. The property management software will alert the user when they view the leases page if they have no units. The alert will notify the user that they cannot add a lease until they add a unit and will provide them with a link to the add unit page. This alert enhancement has been also implemented for the units page if they have no properties and the tenants page if they have no leases.

These are just some of the new features and modifications that we have been working on this week. The more feedback we get from you, the more we will continue to improve the application. To become a Beta tester please visit our invitation request form, or visit our online property management application for more information

Are you ready to join the Stampede?

Win a $50 Gas Card!

During these hard economic times, all of us here at Property Stampede know how hard it is to keep gas in your car. So we want to help one of our beta testers by giving them a $50 Gas Card!

How this is going to work is simple really. We want all of our beta testers to use our website and take notes on things that you think would improve Property Stampede. Once you have your notes, click on the 'Home' tab, then 'Support / Case Tracking'. From here you can submit a case, this being a new feature we released about a week ago.

Enter for a title, '$50 Gas Card'. Select a priority of 'normal' and case type as 'Feature Request'. In the case description field, write us what you think is the #1 thing we can add, change, or remove from the site to make Property Stampede the best online property management application on the planet!

DON'T FORGET THE RULES!

All entries must be entered by the 4th of July! New beta testers are welcome to participate, so if you are not a beta tester, go to our online property management software and signup. There is no limit on the number of entries a user may submit. There will be a minimum of One Winner and Property Stampede LLC reserves the right to determine which entry they feel was the winning entry. Lastly, the winning user can not be a employee of Property Stampede LLC.

Sincerely,

Christopher Mancini
Director of Business Development

Property Stampede Progress Update

I realize it has seemed quiet as of late and I apologize for the time since we have made a post. We have been extremely busy fixing issues, adding functionality, and supporting the software.

Currently I have a list of changes that we have released to production to share with you:

• We have simplified the signup and login process
• Made changes to the homepage to improve navigation
• Improved some back end code to increase performance
• Implemented some new back end interfaces to improve our ability to provide efficient and effective support to you, our end users
• Released our Case Support System allowing end users to easilly submit a problem, feature request or question
• You can now add a tenant from within the tenants screen
• We have created the ability to manage vendors from within the accounting component
• We have enhanced the CRM functionality by allowing end users to manage businesses and assign contacts to a business from within the organize component
• You can now clone a property or unit, allowing for an end user to quickly enter in multiple properties and units that are similar
• Fixed miscellaneous bugs and issues

What you can expect in upcoming releases:

• We are still working on project and task management to be added to the organize component
• Tenant Portal: Very soon we will release the tenant portal. When you add a tenant with an email address, that tenant will receive an email allowing them to login and access their account information. They will then be able to make / schedule payments, view their lease, and place service requests.
• Rent Roll Report

I will have more information in the near future. If you have not signed up for the beta, you can do so by logging on to our property management application.

Christopher Mancini
Director of Business Development

Progress Update

So here we are exactly two weeks into the private beta and we have had a few issues but all is well. We have made some major improvements to the homepage of the tool, making it simpler for new users to create an account, as well as login. We have released some minor changes throughout the site as a whole and made modifications to the sites publicly accessible pages.

We are actively developing and have slated to release the project and task management components as well as our first round of marketing components and reporting components. If you have not signed up to participate in the beta, you can do so now by visiting our online property management application.

Property Stampede Releases to Private Beta!

Well it is now the 15th, and we know that a lot of you are thinking... Did they do it? Well we are proud to announce that we released the first version of our Beta. Countless late nights and very understanding wives allowed this to happen.

So what do we have? Currently you are able to sign up as a beta tester and try our software for free. Please note that this is a private release, so you have to request a pass code by going to our online property management application, which we will email you as we offer more invitations. This allows you to enter that code and create an account and start using the beta software right away for free!

With the pass code, you have complete access for at least 120 days to our online property management application. You can add your units, including residential, commercial and industrial units, add amenities to both properties and the units, create both draft and active leases, make notes on the leases and the units, add your tenants, receive payments, and have access to complete integrated accounting software.

All this plus realtime charts such as occupancy rate, cash flow and account balance, displayed right on your dashboard so you can easily view your company's key statistics.

Please note that this is our first beta, and there will be much more to come! Your feedback is the key to turning Property Stampede into a truly great product.

Are you ready to join the stampede?

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

We Have Screen Shots!

I appreciate everyone's patience in waiting for our beta to begin, unfortunately due to an outbreak of influenza and the magnitude of work that needed to be completed, we have to push the date for the beta back. After careful consideration we are pushing the beta back to May 15th.

In lieu of not wanting to leave you empty handed we have prepared a 'sneak peak' via a few screen shots. Any feedback on what you see in the screen shots is greatly appreciated.

Craigslist Real Estate Scams

I was reading 360Digest's post about real estate scams on Craigslist and I was slightly shocked out how creative criminals are becoming. This criminal took an MLS listed home and created a "For Rent" ad on Craigslist. He would reply readily with any prospective tenant and was very informative. When the tenant decided that they wanted to rent the place, he instructed them to send him a deposit via check.

Reading about this new case of fraud reminded me about all of the fraud on Ebay and how little by little Ebay began to see a decreasing number of auctions and traffic. Many people were fearful of Ebay altogether. Craigslist could see a similar trend as fraud becomes more apparent.

Which leads me to my next thought, I believe that our apartment search can be a place for prospective tenants to shop fraud free. My logic behind this is quite simple. In order to list a unit for rent you have to be a subscriber to our property management application, in which all but one account will require a credit card to pay for the subscription.

We will also require a verified checking account before a property manager can list a unit for two reasons. The first is because we will require an application fee for prospective tenants so that we can ensure quality leads for our property managers. The second is because we will be accepting online payments for security deposits and rent.

With these two levels of security, I am quite confident that we can offer a fraud free environment for people to find a place to rent.

Early Beta Signups Open

For those of you who have been anticipating a beta, we are opening for phase 1 of our beta on April 1st. For this phase, we are only accepting beta testers who are currently managing property.

If you are interested in our product, but are worried about having to take the time to enter your data, stop worrying. As long as you can give us your data in an excel document, access database, or comma delimited format we can upload your data into our system for you. Then all you have to do is update the data from within our interface to fill in any holes.

So when you are ready to join the stampede and improve your property management processes, please click the link below.

Join the Stampede & Improve Your Property Management Business

In the meantime, while we wait for the beta please take a moment and subscribe to StampedeBlog so you can be up to date with our progress. You can subscribe via email and every new post will be sent directly to your inbox, so please subscribe now.

Property Stampede Feature List

As we near the release to beta, I want to share with you our current features and features that are in development.

Property and Portfolio Management Tools:

1. Track key Property and unit details
   
2. Attach Images to a Property or Unit
3. Grant property owners access to view the progress of their portfolio

Lease and Tenant Management:

1. Tenant Contact Management
2. Track critical lease details
3. Online tenant messaging system
4. Receive rent due and lease renewal reminders
5. Tenants can login and view lease details, submit maintenance requests and view payment history
6. Tenants can schedule automatic electronic payments or make manual payments for rent or security deposits using paypal, google checkout, credit card or their checking account
   

Complete Accounting:

1. Maintain complete accounting records with full general ledger accounting
2. Track all of your bank accounts in one place
   
3. Units on lease automatically record rental income
   
4. All electronic transactions are recorded automatically
   
5. Record expenses by unit, property, or portfolio
6. Export to Excel, Quickbooks or Peachtree
7. Income and expense reports by property or portfolio
   
8. Monthly cash flow reporting
9. Key Figures like occupancy ratings, bad debt ratings and more
   

Marketing:

1. Company portal which is search engine optimized
• Company contact information including staff profiles
  
• Display full portfolio
  
• List vacancies that are then search able by visitors
• Prospective tenants can select a vacancy, then apply for residency including pay an application fee
  
• Customizable layout and content
  
2. List vacancies through Property Stampede's listing service
3. Tools to help you list your vacancies on other sites like craigslist
   

Maintenance:

1. Receive Maintenance requests via text message or sms
2. Convert Maintenance requests into work orders
3. Record and attach time on job for employees or invoices from vendors to work orders

Staff Collaboration:

1. Allows multiple users with access rights managed by an administrative account
   
2. Internal Messaging system
3. Allows users to upload and share documents from leases, forms, signed contracts and more

Welcome to StampedeBlog.com

I am honored to write the first post for this blog. We began development of this company in December of 2007. It has only been a short time and we are near ready to release PropertyStampede.com to a public beta.

For those of you who are not aware of Property Stampede, here is a brief introduction. Several years ago my wife and I were in a tight spot and had to move quickly. My wife Rachel immediately went online to try to find details on available apartments in the area. After visiting the big names like rent.com, forrent.com, and apartmentfinder.com we were disappointed with the options we found for available housing. I realized something. Almost all of the major online listing services had listings of apartment complexes. You could not find any apartments in two or three unit buildings, which was really what we were looking for. Not to mention the listings for apartment complexes were vague in that they listed 2 BR Apartments starting at $505/mo and a generic floor plan. They provided us with no details of the unit.

We ended up finding an apartment through the newspaper. Being a computer guru for the last 10 years and seeing the technological innovations of our time, it was extremely disappointing to not be able to pick out an apartment online.

From this problem, PropertyStampede was born. The goal of PropertyStampede is to solve this problem by providing a web based solution for property managers that is competitively priced, increases collaboration between staff members, greatly decrease the amount of data entry involved in a property managers daily routine, and provide the property manager with marketing tools to significantly decrease the cost of advertising per unit. Among the marketing tools is a listing service through PropertyStampede that allows prospective tennants to search through the property manager's available units at no extra charge.

At this time PropertyStampede is still in the development phase. We will be announcing in the near future a public beta of the software that will be by application only. Beta participants will be able to use the software free of charge during the beta. Upon completion of the beta, every participant that becomes a subscriber to PropertyStampede.com will receive a credit for 3 months of service. There will also be a discount for subscribing to an annual program. The discount amount is yet TBD. As we get closer to releasing the software to beta, I will provide a full list of features.

As the project progresses I will post more details about the software, how you can sign up for beta, and overall development of the company. I will also be writing posts revolving around topics that effect property manager's daily lives. To stay up to date on this blog, you can sign up for email notifications or subscribe through your favorite RSS reader by visiting this site's feed.