Proper

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 an app that would unite everyone involved into property management at this scale. Together with us, they’ve created a 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.

THE 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 fulfil 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

Our developers and UX designers have delivered a fluid mobile app that makes tenant/landlord relationship much less complicated. 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. Afterwards, 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 tenant had specified in the maintenance request. In the end, this matching address will be sent to the contractor.

As for the latter, 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 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.