The Agile Entrepreneurship Podcast

The Agile Entrepreneurship Podcast


Building a rental property management software with Nathan Miller

October 15, 2020

Subscribe & DownloadListen onApple PodcastsFollow us onSoundCloudListen on       Google PlayListen on       ​SpotifyGuest: ​​​​​​Nathan Miller ​Episode Transcript (Click to expand)00:08Ramesh: Hello everyone. Welcome to one more episode of the agile entrepreneur podcast and video cast. So today I'm going to talk to a gentleman who is in the real estate industry. Both from a technology side as well as the investor in developer side. So Nathan Miller is the president and CEO of Rentec direct, a popular property management software that helps property managers and landlords with their day to day tasks. Nathan is also a real estate investor and developer and proud husband and father. So I'm very eager to meet Nate. Hey Nathan, do you go by Nate or Nathan?00:53Nathan: Nathan is great. Thank you.00:55Ramesh: Fantastic. Nathan, welcome to the agile entrepreneurial podcast.00:59Nathan: Thanks for having me.01:01Ramesh: Great. So I introduce you and Nathan, but if you could tell in your own words what is when tech direct and what do you do with that?01:10Nathan: Yeah, well Rentec direct is a, it's a project that I started as a more or less a hobby because I was a and still am a landlord and needed technology to help me be more efficient. As I started gaining properties and managing properties on my own, I realized there's a, there's a lot of stuff that goes into it. You have a lot of things to keep track of. Not just, you know, accounting records or taxes, but you got maintenance and you got, you know, who's late and you have tenant communication and all this stuff. Once I had five or six rentals, I was managing became a little, a little excessive, but it took a lot of brain power and the time to think about and to maintain. And I also had a full-time job. So part of my background is I'm a software developer and I'm self-taught and I understand how technology can help people be more efficient. So I went out on a journey to make my landlord activities more efficient through software and created an application to help me with all those tasks, anything that could be automated, I automate it. And that was the beginning of Rentec direct. It was not necessarily intended to be a business or what it turned into today, but what that ended up morphing into is asoftware application that now helps about 15,000 property managers and landlords. And we've added a lot of stuff in the last 10 years to make the life of property managers easy and kind of cool. Because you know, being a property manager isn't sound a that glamorous but we can provide them tools that make things better for their tenants and so your tenants can pay online so they can select the best tenants. So anyways, in a nutshell we provide software to property managers. It's you can kind of think of it like a we are the QuickBooks for the property management industry, but we add in all the various special stuff that property managers need in order to Excel in their market.03:28Ramesh: Excellent. Nathan. So now that we have a very good background about your company, so let's trace the journey of your company. So you were a landlord first, and then at what point did you actually take the first steps to write the application?03:47Nathan: This is, we're probably about 2007 when I did this and let's see I had, I believe about five of units I was managing and that's where it became too much work to do it on the side without help. So I had to at that point make a decision, you know, do I focus less on this or focus more on it? And it was right at that point where I decided that, you know what, I'm going to, I was actually very excited about the prospect of creating an application and I decided, you know, I'm just going to set my alarm early and I'm going to wake up early and I'm going to work on this before work. And I got so excited about the prospects of what this could become and how much it could help me in ...