Frustration - The Story of Rent Marketer and Innovation

3 years ago I was frustrated. I soon found that frustration became the catalyst for innovation.

In 2002 I began working for Google. While at Google Tim Moynihan and I grew the Mt States region from $1 million a year in revenue to over $100 million 4 years later. Working for Google 60-80 hours a week wasn’t enough for me and I began moonlighting and investing in real estate.

By 2005 I had acquired multiple investment properties and at times would have 6 - 10 properties vacant at any one time. In order to reach as many potential renters as possible I knew my properties needed to be on multiple websites.

The story of frustration began. I posted my properties one by one on many rental sites. Each posting, each site, each word and each photo began to intensify my frustration.

It would take hours to post one property on many sites and then hours more to make any changes. Most of the sites I was posting to had a monthly fee which in turn cost me a lot of money. With this tedious and repetitive task, I was making errors.

To say the least, I was FRUSTRATED.

This frustration became the aha moment. I wanted to offer a solution for this frustration. If I was frustrated, I knew other property managers, investors and agents were frustrated as well.

I immediately went to Einsteins Bagels, sat down, and wrote the business plan on a napkin.

The Rent Marketer idea and business model was born. We wanted to offer one place for real estate investors, property managers and agents to post their rental properties and have it distributed to many rental and classifieds sites at once. This vision turned into a reality with the help of Dariusz Rakowicz and Lisa Ray. Our mantra became more sites = more leads.

Two and half years later, Rent Marketer has become one of the largest ad networks in the world for rental advertisers. Since launch we have rolled out additional innovative products due to frustration.

For those in the multi-family industry who are frustrated with the price of online advertising and manual postings to many sites, we rolled out a Cost-Per-Lead distribution model called Apartment Marketer.

For those of you who are renters and are frustrated with going to multiple websites searching for a rental property, we launched rentBits.com, a free national rental search engine that crawls over 150 different sources and offers over 400,000 active single family homes and apartments for rent.

If you are frustrated with a product, service or policy. Change it. Remember, this frustration is the catalyst for innovation. All you have to do is realize it, take action and implement.