The vision
Surely, among us, there are people who have never rented a place in
their entire life. Most people did, however, and they can tell you one
thing with a high degree of confidence: Asking your landlord to fix
something can take more than a few attempts. This might not be the
biggest pitfall in renting but the issue highly common. Owners just
don’t have the time!
Usually, they might indeed be willing to help you out with your thing,
but landlords are often just too caught up in their own business. Thus,
it takes a while. You just remind them every time they come up to pick
the rent and then they mostly forget.
Is there really nothing one can do?
That’s what the kind folk at Proper thought and so started the project
that would eventually change rental business and make it less hopeless
for the ill-fated tenants. The team had conceived a plan to design the
mobile app that would unite everyone involved in property management at
this scale.
Together with us, they’ve created the rental property management mobile
app that would help tenants easily communicate any issues that come
around, remind the landlords about their pending requests and hire
professionals to resolve these problems.
Landlord/Tenant Communication App Development Challenge
Proper wasn’t going to be the first mobile app we’ve ever created. The
specific usage purposes, on the other hand, have proven to be quite
sophisticated and took a very elaborate approach to user flows that make
the Proper we know today. The main challenge was to unite three parties,
each having its own unique role and thus a set of functions they would
use to fulfill their specific goals.
For instance, the tenant would need the means to create an issue. The
landlord, on the other hand, would have to supervise the work and need a
correct toolset to prove it’s legit as well as to make payments within
the app. Somewhere in-between the start and finish line, the contractor
would have to verifiably take the job, prove it’s complete, and receive
the payment. All these functions took iterations upon iterations to come
up with a viable UX and UI which pushed our designers and product
managers to think far out of the box.
THE SOLUTION
Thanks to strong expertise in
real estate app development
our engineers and UX designers have delivered a fluid mobile app for
tenants and landlords.
They’ve managed to predict and cover all the user flows required to
fulfill the needs of our client base. Both tenant and landlord go
through a fairly similar SMS register/login process.
Our app uses Firebase Realtime. It allows us to easily create active
shortened SMS links which log you into your mobile app right away. In
case you don’t have it installed, the link automatically takes you to
the App Store or Google Play page.
In order to report an issue, the tenant can take a photo describing the
problem or upload it from the galley. Afterward, you need to choose the
category of the issue from the available classification menu. Then, fill
in the details describing it along with the address of residence and
send it to the landlord.
Before the report is out, you see a displayed Google Map location that
lets you make sure you’ve entered the right address. Correct location
data is important.
If one landlord has multiple properties rented by tenants, he or she can
view them in a single unified list. In order to prevent any confusion,
the owner re-enters and confirms the address that the tenant had
specified in the maintenance request. In the end, this matching address
will be sent to the contractor.
As for the latter, the register stage for third-party contractors is
taken to the pinnacle of its ease. They are able to sign in via Get Paid
button. After the landlord has added them to their contact list, which
they can do manually or by fetching the device contact list, contractors
can view the details and take the job right away. When it’s complete,
they can send the invoice from within the app which supports direct
debit card payments.
Both the tenant and landlord are able to view completed and pending jobs
from a separate list and discuss them via chat as well as to visit the
page of each request and view its multiple attachments.
