The RentSentinel Story

It would be cool to share some extravagant story about the RentSentinel beginnings that included fancy conference tables, trust falls, business suits and Pellegrino water; but the truth is it was nothing like that. It was the summer of 2008 and Eric Broughton, now President, needed to rent his home in a struggling economy.

Eric’s personal need to rent his former home forced many conversations about how to effectively market available properties. A friend suggested he consider using Craigslist which led Eric to have a conversation with Steve Small, who at the time was consulting for AMLI Residential as CIO. Eric inquired about which tools AMLI was using to market properties and specifically how many leads they generated from Craigslist. They found one AMLI property that had a great amount of traffic from Craigslist.

They contacted the leasing agent from Seattle and learned that although he was having great success he was spending 50% of his time manually entering property information. It was a time consuming yet effective task for generating traffic to his community so he made it part of his daily routine. This notion got Steve and Eric pondering how they could create a Craigslist tool to make the lead generation process easier for the multifamily industry.

At this time Steve and Eric had several ongoing projects at Yield Technologies, a leader in real estate technology and management consulting solutions. Steve and Eric worked with Kevin (now Design Manager) and others to develop a prototype solution for posting to Craigslist. With the help of large quantities of Mountain Dew and ping pong breaks Kevin spent many late nights designing a successful working solution.

Steve and Eric had ongoing initiatives at Yield Technologies and had to decide which idea would produce the breakthrough product they envisioned. Andy Hamilton, now CTO, had successfully assisted in the management of several consulting projects and was a rising star in the organization. After being brought onto the leadership team he was vocal about capitalizing on the developing Craigslist market and saw great opportunity in creating a Craigslist tool for property management companies.

Andy and Eric developed the concepts for a marketing management platform and expanded it to encompass other marketing sources. As Yield Technologies moved towards product development and away from consulting, they spent weeks building requirements to demonstrate database flow and designed a proof of concept in hopes to sell the product. After many discussions, the team realized they worked too hard on this valuable product to sell it, which led to the establishment of their own product for the multifamily industry.

In a presentation at the 2009 AIM conference, Steve shared the new product with the multifamily industry to great excitement due to its groundbreaking Craigslist management capabilities. RentSentinel, as you know it today, is the flagship product from Yield Technologies and delivers apartment marketing management software that covers everything from Listing to Lease for companies that manage from 1 to 1,000 communities.

RentSentinel started with a product concept and has expanded its suite to offer tools that market, measure and manage property portfolios throughout the renting lifecycle. The RentSentinel team recently relocated to a larger office to accommodate team growth and is continuously improving application security, architecture and infrastructure. Our development, sales, customer support and marketing teams work collaboratively to create innovative solutions for the multifamily industry, stay tuned for much more!