Innago offers simple, powerful, and free online property management software. Whether you have one unit or one thousand, Innago makes life easier. Watch this full product demo of Innago below.
In this Product Demo Showcase, Innago CEO & Co-Founder, Dave Spooner, walks us through a complete demonstration of the Innago platform and why it’s so powerful and simple to use for rental property managers and DIY landlords. Along with showcasing all the features of the Innago platform, Dave emphasizes the importance of effective tenant screening and the platform’s ability to streamline various processes, making property management more efficient and less time-consuming for landlords. Dave also discusses the challenges and solutions in property management, focusing on maintenance ticket management, tenant communication, user experience, and more.
Watch the product demo here:
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Show Notes
Takeaways
- Innago was created to address the dissatisfaction of DIY landlords with existing property management tools.
- The platform is free to use, generating revenue through tenant fees for services like rent collection and screening reports.
- Innago focuses on tenant management, providing landlords with essential information at their fingertips.
- The user interface is designed to be intuitive and easy to navigate, catering to landlords who may not be tech-savvy.
- Landlords can advertise properties and syndicate listings across multiple platforms with ease.
- Effective tenant screening is crucial for landlords to ensure reliable cash flow and reduce headaches.
- Innago offers a digital document signing feature that simplifies lease agreements and other necessary paperwork.
- The platform includes a help wizard powered by ChatGPT to assist users with common questions and issues.
- Expense tracking is made easy with the ability to photograph receipts and categorize expenses automatically.
- Maintenance management is streamlined to prevent communication issues between landlords and tenants. Maintenance tickets should be received through a centralized system.
- Organizing and scheduling maintenance tasks is crucial for efficiency.
- Effective communication can significantly improve tenant satisfaction.
- Innago allows tenants to submit maintenance tickets easily via app or web.
- Automated reminders and notifications enhance communication with tenants.
- User-friendly design is essential for both landlords and tenants.
- Innago focuses on continuous improvement and feature refinement.
- The platform aims to simplify property management tasks for landlords.
- Integrations with accounting software like QuickBooks are important for landlords.
- Future features will enhance community engagement among tenants.
Chapters
00:00 – Introduction to Innago and Property Management Technology
02:22 – Understanding Innago’s Business Model
05:05 – Exploring v’s User-Friendly Interface
08:20 – The Tenant Journey: From Listing to Application
11:39 – Key Features of Innago: Applications and Leasing
14:50 – Streamlining Rent Collection and Income Management
19:14 – Managing Expenses and Maintenance Requests
20:59 – Streamlining Maintenance Ticket Management
24:21 – Enhancing Communication with Tenants
30:56 – User-Friendly Tenant Experience
35:09 – Future Developments and Features
41:18 – Getting in Touch with Innago
Transcript
Beau Hamilton (00:05)
Hello everyone. My name is Beau Hamilton, Senior Editor and Multimedia Producer here at SourceForge, the world’s most visited software comparison site where B2B software buyers compare and find business software solutions.
Today we’re diving into the world of property management technology with Innago, a company that’s transforming the way landlords and property managers handle their rentals. They have a free property management platform that streamlines everything from managing a property, from, you know, renting, rent collection to lease signing and handling maintenance requests. It really aims to, you know, do it all without much of, I would say the complexity and, you know, higher costs associated with other more traditional solutions.
And joining us is Dave Spooner, Co-founder and CEO of Innago, who will share the story behind the platform and give us a live demo of how Innago is making property management easier than ever. And this is one of our first installments of our new SourceForge Product Demo Showcase. And we really couldn’t be more excited to have him here to give us a walkthrough of his product. So, Dave, welcome to the show, glad you can join us.
Dave Spooner (01:06)
Yeah, Beau, so excited to be here. Thanks for having me.
Beau Hamilton (01:08)
Yeah, before I ask you to share your screen and get into some of the nitty gritty details of your platform, I want to sort of set the stage and cover some of the basics. So first of all, can you introduce yourself and talk about what inspired you to build Innago?
Dave Spooner (01:22)
Yeah, so my name is Dave. I am one of the Co-founders here at Innago. I actually got my start in real estate technology in the student housing space specifically. And, you know, student housing is an interesting space. It’s really dominated by small to mid-size independent, mostly DIY landlords.
And when we were talking to these landlords, we kept hearing over and over again that they were not satisfied with the tools that existed in the market for them. They didn’t feel like what was out there was cost effective. They felt like it had too many features or features that weren’t really tailored to them. It was difficult to use. They had very minimal time to learn how to manage and learn how to manage with these softwares. And they felt like they needed to take a whole course just to learn how to use it.
So we realized, hey, we should build something here. And I connected with an engineer on that particular project of that company. And we said, hey, let’s try to start something that satisfies the needs of these landlords. And that’s when we launched Innago back in 2017. And we’ve been hard at work trying to make it simple and easy for these landlords to manage their properties ever since.
Beau Hamilton (02:23)
That’s awesome. Yeah, you found that missing need and took action on it. That’s cool.
There’s a lot of moving parts obviously with managing a property and people. So I can see a lot of the value offering for this product. And you obviously don’t want to spend as little time as possible managing your properties. You can spend your time elsewhere. So that’s pretty neat.
I’m curious about your business model. It’s my understanding that Innago is free. If that’s the case, how do you generate revenue to make this platform possible?
Dave Spooner (02:53)
Yeah, so to quickly answer your question, we generate revenue through a few different places. We are free to use no cost whatsoever, no contract, nothing like that. When a landlord accepts rent through Innago and the tenant pays, we charge the tenant a small fee. So it’s a couple of bucks for an ACH transaction. It’s around 3% for a credit or debit card transaction. That’s paid by the tenant by default. Landlords can choose to take it on. The vast majority pay it, hand it off to their tenants, and it’s really no problem at all.
We also charge for screening reports. If you screen an applicant through Innago, the applicant pays for the reports. A tenant can purchase renter’s insurance if they’d like to through our platform. We make a commission on that. So there’s a few different places typically charged to tenants that we do make money. But really the ethos behind the whole free thing, because we get a lot of pushback on this. People can’t believe it. They think there’s a big catch there. The ethos behind it is, again, it’s all about that DIY landlord. We realize that these DIY landlords, in addition to being short on time, you know, they’re, I shouldn’t say short on capital, but they’re certainly short on patience for expending capital, right? They’re very bottom line aware.
So we knew that making Innago free to use would make it really compelling for landlords, and we really wanted to achieve that. So we felt like we found a good way to charge a small amount to a distributed population of a lot of people, rather than price gouge a handful of landlords that have signed up for us.
Beau Hamilton (04:13)
Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. I think generally speaking, hefty subscription fees, they can be bit of a tough sell. They sort of cut into the margins that landlords and managers are really keeping an eye on right? So…
Dave Spooner (04:27)
Yeah. And the beauty of it is, you know, we feel like this really aligns us with the landlord in their intention, right? So typically when you adopt something like property management software, one of the primary reasons you do it. I mean, there’s, there could be a lot of reasons, but one of the primaries often online payments were totally aligned there. That’s predominantly how we make money, right? So we want the tenants’ experience to be exceptional. We want it to be really smooth. And we feel like we have to resell ourselves to these landlords every single month because there’s nothing holding them to us. There’s no card on file, there’s no contract. So we got to continue to deliver every single month. We feel like that’s a really compelling case for these landlords.
Beau Hamilton (05:01)
Yeah, I think that’s a great way, great segue to dive into the software and get sort of a visual hands-on overview of the features. So it looks like we have a dashboard, a bunch of information and modules. I’ll let you sort of take it away here and explain kind of what we’re looking at and talk about some of the things that Innago aims to simplify.
Dave Spooner (05:21)
Yeah, so fundamentally, when we were building Innago, we felt like the number one problem for these DIY landlords is not putting together cash flow analysis or IRR reports to determine when they need to sell their property. You can even predict when a refrigerator is going to go out of service and you need to buy a new one. The number one variable we felt for these landlords, especially DIY landlords, was the tenants.
So we’ve really tried to orient our software around the idea of better management of tenants. Tenant management software is what we call ourselves internally. Nobody uses that phrase in the market, so we don’t market ourselves that way. But we call ourselves tenant management software because we think that’s fundamentally the most important piece of this process.
So we’re trying to give you a lot of information on the tenant management front right up front. That’s the day-to-day thing that you’re going to be interacting with. So you can see on this dashboard, we’ve got collection stats, who’s paid rent, who hasn’t. You can click on one of these and jump right into it.
We’ve got documents that are currently being signed like a lease for this Jefferson Avenue apartment Applicants that have come through maintenance tickets that need to be addressed whether it’s a scheduled maintenance ticket or an open one that one of the tenants submitted and then your occupancy statistics. So everything’s kind of at your fingertips right here and mostly everything is only a click or two away for you to do a basic simple action to better manage your properties and tenants.
Beau Hamilton (06:36)
Yeah, it seems like it’s pretty intuitive, you know, easy to navigate. I see you have the navigation panel to the side. You’ve got nice big modules, buttons that stand out, right? What, you know, that being said, how do you, you know, continue, how do you focus on making the interface user friendly for those who might not be as tech savvy?
Dave Spooner (06:58)
Yeah, we are kind of obsessed with this. We really try to test and think through from a design standpoint everything that we do. And we try to be very deliberate in the features that we add and the features that we don’t add as well. It’s really important to us. So yeah, I think colors are really important, balancing colors, simplifying pages, not putting too much information on the page. I’ll tell you what, I’ll show you the properties page. We recently revamped this, actually. We viewed the properties page as kind of like a dashboard, right? A secondary dashboard, for a specific property.
So again, you can quickly see what’s the rent that you’re charging, how much is overdue on this particular property. This gives you a quick overview of what’s going on with these leases, and they’re color-coded. Once you look at this little “i” information tag, it’s going to show you what that color coding means, and you can easily take in that info every time you get here. You see your occupancy, you see open maintenance tickets, and if you click on one of these, it’s going to show you a breakdown of those individual units. You can click further in, and again, you’ve got kind more of a dashboard feel.
So really just trying to surface relevant information without overwhelming the landlord as they’re going through was kind of the fundamental thing we always attempt to do when we’re building new features.
Beau Hamilton (08:06)
Okay, yeah, do you want to take us through like adding a new property or maybe some of the different modules on the side?
Dave Spooner (08:12)
Yeah, sure. So I think, you know, the kind of tenant journey is you start with finding the tenant, right? First, you need to advertise your property. And Innago does have features that will cover that for you. So I’ll just quickly show you the listings piece. So, you know, I created a listing here for Jefferson Avenue Apartments. We got an availability for a one bed, $1,500 bucks. Now, when you create this listing, you can add photos, can add a description, amenities, etcetera.
You can also publish this to various relevant listing networks. So, you know, Realtor, Zumper, Zillow, etcetera. These also have multiple sites underneath them. So all total, it’s like 15 websites that you’ll publish to when you syndicate through Innago. And we’ll blast that out for you. We’ll put it on all those websites and people can start inquiring. You can easily fill your rentals with just a couple of clicks of the button rather than having to go to each of these sites individually.
Beau Hamilton (09:01)
Okay, that’s cool. Yeah, it’s almost like a social media management platform where I can like, you know, post…
Dave Spooner (09:08)
Yeah.
Beau Hamilton (09:08)
…send out one post across all my platforms, all my networks.
Dave Spooner (09:11)
Yeah, it’s like HootSuite. Yeah, totally. Yeah. So you get your listing up. Hopefully you get lots of inquiries. You find a good renter or you find a handful of good renters. And the next thing you need to do is screen them, right? I tell landlords all the time, one of the most important things you can do as a landlord is effective screening. A good tenant is literally worth their weight in gold. I mean, they’re going to produce thousands in cash flow and reduce headaches for you.
So we have a great application service within Innago, so you can go straight from that listing right into Applications. I got a couple of sample applications for us here. These two applicants did just a basic application. Now we could also do a full screening for them if we wanted to. We can customize our application with specific questions that we want to ask. We can even add custom fields like a file uploader if you want them to input their driver’s license or their latest pay stumps, right?
Once you’ve crafted your application, we’ll give you a default one to make it quick and easy for you, but if you do want to customize, you can. Once you’ve crafted that application, you can start requesting it. So you can request directly by email, you know, type in somebody’s email, fire it off, or, this is really cool, you can use this URL and you can copy this and share this. So this is great for sending, you know, via text, via email, put it on your website if you have one, put it in your Facebook Marketplace post, wherever it is, you can share this application and anybody can go click that and submit an application for you to review and screen.
Beau Hamilton (10:43)
Wow. Yeah, that’s great. Very friendly, very user friendly.
Dave Spooner (10:47)
Yeah, yeah, and we offer credit, criminal eviction, and income history can all be attained through our application service.
Beau Hamilton (10:56)
Okay. And then for this, the view that we’re looking at here, is this, this is kind of a property management demo or how do you, is this how you use a Innago personally, or can you talk about, talk about the different use cases here?
Dave Spooner (11:10)
So this is just like a demo account that we kind of filled with some data. I do use Innago. I’ve got eight units myself. And yeah, I use the applications. I use the lease signing. I use all that stuff. So it’s really easy and user-friendly for even a small animal like myself with just eight units.
Beau Hamilton (11:28)
Gotcha. Now, what are some of your favorite features, I guess? You talked about some of the applications, managing tenants, kind of keeping a viewpoint of how good of a tenant they are, right? So what are some other features you would like to highlight?
Dave Spooner (11:46)
Well, say, OK, so I’m going to answer very personally here, one of my favorite features. And there’s lots more. And I’ll show you leasing, and I’ll show you collecting rent, which everybody cares about, of course, and maintenance tickets and stuff like that. Lots of cool things.
But we’re on applications. And I think probably my favorite feature within applications is actually, within the whole software is related to applications. So I own some properties with my brother and sister. And I’ll tell you just a quick story about this. We, especially on our first few properties, we would all go do listings depending on who was available, or do showings depending on who was available. And for the first like five units, I was the only one that ever got somebody to apply and sign a lease. Whenever they would do it, for whatever reason, they wouldn’t go forward. When I would do it, they would. I don’t have any special like sales ability here.
So we were trying to figure out what the heck’s going on here. Why is it working? We’d like run down the list. Okay, you’re saying that. Yep, you’re saying that. Yeah, we’re saying the exact same stuff. What’s the difference here? And we found out that the one difference in what we were doing behaviorally is that when they would get through the showing, they’d say, okay, hey, just, you know, let us know if you want to apply, we’ll shoot you a link, right? I was not waiting for that. I was saying, hey, let me get your phone number. And I was texting them. I pull up my phone. I’d go into the app. I’d copy this URL. And I’d text it to them right then and there. And I’d say, hey, we’re just going to start you with a basic free application. You get it in today, his place is yours for 24 hours. After that, we’ll open it up for the next person. But just get the application in, and it’s yours for 24 hours. We’d start with that basic application. And then once we get the application, we look over it. OK, this all looks good. You can actually request additional screening. So you don’t have to go full screening out of the gate and charge them $30, $35 bucks. You can start with this basic free one, get their foot in the door, get them excited about the rental, and then do additional screening with them.
So it’s a small feature. Like, it doesn’t seem like much to separate those two things and have that URL, but it made a massive difference. And now I’m just one of many doing showings. I’m nothing special. Sometimes they get them, sometimes I get them, because we’re all doing this process that really makes it as easy as possible for these applicants and tenants to choose our rental, right? We don’t wanna make it hard. We don’t wanna create friction for them. We make it as easy as possible with these steps.
Beau Hamilton (13:52)
Yeah, that does make it super easy. And just having the link, as a customer, or client, or tenant, having that link sent to me right away and having all the information at a click, that’s great. Because I would get so distracted and put things off and then ultimately not follow up with you. So it’s just a win-win all around.
Dave Spooner (14:11)
Exactly. And then they got to track down our contact information or somebody else makes it easier at the next showing. They’re like, well, they’re about the same. I’ll just go with this one. All those things add up. So anyway, once you have these applicants in here and you decide you want to rent to one of them, we have a great digital document signing feature within Innago and I actually sent one in process just to prepare for this.
So you can create your own templates. Innago actually gives you a bunch of options for templates. Like we have state specific agreements that you can grab from here. You can also upload your own document, like your own PDF, and fill it up for signing if you have ever used DocuSign. It is essentially very similar, powered by the same technology. You can create those templates. You do have to just send laces. You can send pet addendums. You can send lead-based paint disclosures. You can send a notice to quit through this and have it signed by you. There are all sorts of different ways you can send really any document under the sun. But once it is sent, we are going to track it for you, right?
So we’ll let you know when they viewed it, right? They have access to it. When they’ve signed it, when you’re up to sign it, etcetera. So you have full transparency, the ability to create that template, the ability to sign that template. For me, once we go from application stage to the person saying, yeah, I want to rent it, it takes me like a minute and a half to actually generate that lease agreement, it’s so fast. Once we have our template set up, it’s really great.
Beau Hamilton (15:31)
OK, yeah, that is super quick. Quick turnaround. Now what are the templates? What does the templates tab look like? out of curiosity.
Dave Spooner (15:40)
Yeah, so that’s where it’s going to have any templates you’ve created. We just have one here. You can have any number that you want. There’s no limit. And then again, when you go to create a new template, you can upload your own file or you can use one of ours. Currently, we just offer lease agreements. are expanding this to a number of additional things like parking agreements, pet agreements, etcetera. So we’ll have all these as offerings for your state, but you can again upload your own file to sign it.
Beau Hamilton (16:05)
And you’re available in all 50 states? Okay, very cool.
Dave Spooner (16:08)
Yeah, all 50 states.
Beau Hamilton (16:09)
Okay, very cool.
Dave Spooner (16:10)
Yeah. Yeah, so then once you’ve got your tenant, you know, once you have the lease signed, you know, you got to collect rent from them, right? So our income page is a place that you’re to find yourself frequently. Again, very simple, very straightforward, clean, easy to understand information. So we can click and see all these. Looks like our buddy Michael Scott here is overdue. Surprise, surprise. Everybody else has paid theirs on time, seemingly.
We can go into this Overdue Invoice. Yep, there’s a late fee. We can automate that for you, of course. So this was likely automatically added. If we need to or want to, we could waive that late fee. We can make edits to the invoice, make changes. We can record a payment against this invoice. Really simple, straightforward features here, add notes, etcetera.
Beau Hamilton (16:55)
I like the late stamp on it like a piece of paper.
Dave Spooner (16:57)
Yeah, yeah it makes it very official. There’s also, I should mention, there’s a great feature that we have. It’s our help wizard here. It is powered by ChatGPT so you can chat with it and say, “Hey, how do I record an offline payment for one of my tenants?” And it’ll actually produce a great answer for you from all the documentation that we have. There’s also this resources tab at the bottom where you can go through all the articles that we have. And if this answer is not adequate for you, you can talk to a live agent. We have live agents working nine to five every day covering answers for you.
And one of the cool things here is that you can navigate around while it’s still on screen for you. So if it’s giving you instructions or giving you screenshots or video, you can follow those as you go, minimize it, bring it back up, etcetera.
Beau Hamilton (17:47)
Does the chatbot helper you have there, does it have the ability to access specific client information right now or is that coming down the pipeline or something? Okay. Yeah, yeah.
Dave Spooner (17:57)
It doesn’t currently, we do have the capability. We just have not enabled that. But yeah, does have, technically it does have the ability to do it, but no, it won’t respond with anything. If you ask like, “Hey, did Michael pay his rent yet?” It’s not going to be like, “Nope, he still owes and he’s got a late fee too”. It’ll be like, “Who’s Michael?”.
Beau Hamilton (18:14)
Yeah, yeah. Okay, very cool. Yeah, the income page would probably be like, I mean, my most visited section.
Dave Spooner (18:26)
Exactly. It’s all about the rent, right? And again, that’s why the dashboard is so critical to and why these are interlinked in a really meaningful way. So if I click Overdue from that dashboard, it’s going to jump right to that Michael Scott Overdue invoice. So you have total clarity on what’s going on with your properties. You can also see past Overdue down here. So fortunately, this particular landlord, Jessica, she’s collected all her rent from the past. She just has this $1220 from Michael Scott that she still needs to collect. So it gives you that transparency, not just on the current month, which obviously is most relevant right now, but also those past months so don’t kind of lose the ball as you’re going.
Beau Hamilton (18:58)
Right. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. OK, so what about expenses?
Dave Spooner (19:03)
So expenses is a fairly simple feature. There’s not a ton going on. You get to record expenses. I’d say one of the coolest things about this feature is that in the mobile app, we do allow you to take a picture of a receipt, and we will generate the expense for you. So if you’re at Lowe’s and you buy something and you don’t want to remember to sit down at your computer and put in an expense, you just snap a picture of that receipt. We will create that for you. We’ll categorize it based on the receipt. We’ll put in all the details, and it’ll attach that receipt image so that you have that record. I use that all the time. My brother and sister use it all the time. It’s a great way to keep track of those expenses.
Other than that, if you need to manually create one, really simple, gonna ask for the basic info you’d expect. And then this is all linked to our P&L report. So if you go to the reports page and you go to P&L report, again, I didn’t have any expenses there to show, but if you are recording your expenses, it’s all gonna be visible right here. And you can click on any of these categories, including the expenses when you do have them, and it pulls up a breakdown of all those individual items. So again, really easy to kind of follow the thread from one item to the next.
Beau Hamilton (20:06)
Nice okay, you can export that all into like a Excel spreadsheet or something too?
Dave Spooner (20:10)
Yeah, there’s three ways to export. You can export the default view, can export a yearly view, or you can export a detailed view. Each is a little bit different, but yeah, it will come through as Excel, and it’s a great, easy way to share it with your CPA at the end of the year.
Beau Hamilton (20:25)
Very cool. Okay, so then you have, okay, you have maintenance and this is an area that’s, you know, every, every property owner landlord has to deal with, right? And it’s, it’s just the necessary evil. You kind of have to, it’s always a headache. It’s, a lot of times it’s very headache inducing.But talk about some of the benefits here.
Dave Spooner (20:44)
So I think there’s three fundamental challenges with maintenance. One is, how do you receive the maintenance tickets, right? You don’t want your tenants texting you. You don’t want your tenants emailing you, honestly, because it might not be a channel that you’re checking regularly. If you stood up on ABC Properties at Gmail, you’re probably not logging into that every day. So maintenance ticket might go there, and you don’t respond for hours, even days sometimes. So how are you receiving them in a way that you’re able to track easily? That’s one of the fundamental challenges.
The second one is how are you organizing tickets, especially scheduled maintenance. So like changing air filters, for example, I know that’s a huge hassle or has been historically for us on our properties is remembering, hey, who did that last? Have we done that? Do we still need to do that?
And then finally, it’s actually executing the maintenance task, right? Do I have to go unclog this toilet? Can I find somebody else to do it? Do I have a handyman that I hire?
So we try to take on all three of those challenges. First and foremost, the tenants can submit a maintenance ticket at any time from their maintenance, or excuse me, from the mobile app, from the web browser, etcetera. So again, they can snap a picture. Like we got Andy Bernard here. saying there’s a gap in the French door. He took some pictures of the gaps here. He submitted them. Then, you know, we can say, OK, we’re going to be on this. Give us 48 hours. We’ll have a handyman there to take care of this. So receiving the ticket, monitoring the ticket, we send you a push notification. We send you a text message, email, etcetera, to let you know that that’s coming. You control those notification settings. But we make sure that you’re aware of it and there’s a centralized place where everybody’s putting their maintenance tickets. So that’s the first challenge.
The second challenge on the scheduling front, you can see it right here, we have a scheduling feature. So you can take a maintenance ticket and you can set a reminder or recurrent schedule. You can also set who it should remind. So if there’s a particular person on your team that always takes care of the HVAC issues, set them as the person to remind. Set how frequently you want to remind them. And then all these tickets are going to be scheduled for you. You can mark each one as completed any time you finish it. So it allows you to stay on top of those schedule items.
And then the final one is executing the maintenance ticket. We have this great feature. We have a partnership with a company called Latchel. They have this huge network of vetted contractors across the country. We’ve connected that to Innago. So if you ever have a repair, if you have an issue like this gap in French doors, I can say book a repair. I give some details to Latchel. It’ll pull some info from Innago. You fill out the rest. It’ll connect you with the contractor, it’ll give you some budget options, you decide if you wanna move forward, and then they start messaging you and it’s taken care of for you.
So if you’re managing remotely, if you just have too much going on because you’re a DIY landlord, this is a phenomenal way to get those maintenance tickets resolved quickly for your tenants without a huge hassle on your end.
Beau Hamilton (23:26)
Yeah, that’s huge. I was going to say, part of my struggle is always trying to find the right person for the job, you know? So the fact that you bundle it in, I didn’t know you had that feature.
Dave Spooner (23:36)
Yeah, yeah, I’ve used it myself on our properties because there’s been times where like, everyone’s like, I have a hectic week, you know, we got kids, we got whatever, we’re like, hey, we can’t, we can’t go deal with this thing right now. Let’s just get somebody in there and take care of it. And the tenants appreciate it so much because, you know, we can have somebody 24 hours later that is a professional that knows what they’re doing. That’s, that’s a pretty phenomenal experience for those tenants and a great experience for us too, because we don’t have to hassle with it.
Beau Hamilton (23:59)
Well, it just seems like in general, going through the different settings here, seems like it’s clearly designed by landlords and property management. It seems like you’ve really thought about everything here. How often do you incorporate new features and updates? Is it kind of like as you discover the need for them, or do you have quarterly release cycles?
Dave Spooner (24:23)
It’s, yeah, we try to have, so we release every week. Now, that can be small things. It can be major things. We try to have a significant release every two weeks to one month. Now, significant to us can be refinement of existing features. We really believe in making sure that what we offer is simple and effective. And that does not mean create a bunch of noise with new features that are not well thought out. So we’re very deliberate, we’re very careful, but we’re constantly tinkering and improving these things to add more depth.
I think that is one of the number one things that I want folks to take away when looking at Innago is just the depth. The list of features, we can’t go toe to toe with some of these legacy software platforms out there, property management software platforms. They’ve got everything under the sun in their software. But a lot of it is clunky or doesn’t work well, or it’s just so many things that you can’t find the thing that you want.
We try to be laser focused on those tenant management tools, making those incredibly effective, save you significant hours in your day, in your week, in your month, and do those things really well with a depth that allows you to accomplish them effectively. And hopefully you’ve kind of seen that depth here. We’ve tried to think of all those little wrinkles that make life a little bit easier for each one of these items.
Beau Hamilton (25:37)
Yeah, and well it just, the depth and also the, just the refreshing kind of more modern aesthetics of the UI, you know, I think that’s…
Dave Spooner (25:44)
Yeah, easy on the eyes.
Beau Hamilton (25:47)
Exactly. I’m a big, as I mentioned earlier. I’m a big visual guys. This is really like, just very intuitive for me. I’ll say.
Dave Spooner (25:53)
Well, we, you know, people consider us a B2B company, right? We’re selling to landlords. Oh, those are businesses. We do not think of ourselves as a B2B company. These are DIY landlords. They have a nine to five job, right? And some, some have become full-time professionals, but even those, when you are in the real estate business, when you’re in the property management business, there is not a single handbook. People typically don’t go get a four year degree in property management like they do in accounting and they follow gap-based principles, right? And everybody knows, you know, this is how you do it. And there’s some creativity, but generally there’s like, these are the rules. This is how it works.
Every one of these landlords, every one of these property managers had a totally different path to become a property manager. They learned from reading books, not the same books, all sorts of different books, listening to podcasts, watching demos, right? Talking to other landlords and networking. So each of them kind of has their own unique spin on things. And we need to be able to handle that. We always talk about ourselves, Hey, we need to be Gmail. We need to be iPhone, right? Anybody can pick us up. And in five minutes, they understand how they’re collecting rent, how they’re booking a repair, how they’re receiving a maintenance ticket. They don’t need to go take a course, you know, for six hours just to get certified in our software. It needs to be easy enough for them to pick up and use right now.
Beau Hamilton (27:02)
Yeah, that’s a good distinction too, because, and I think it stands out for me in particular because I have kind of a background in consumer facing applications having done app reviews on YouTube and product reviews. So like seeing the user friendly elements here of like I can relate it to some of like the UI, the different weather apps I’ve used and stuff that really has to be visually engaging and intuitive and just easy on the eyes, right?
So yeah, that’s really fascinating. So what about the messaging section down there?
Dave Spooner (27:35)
Yeah, so messaging. So, OK, I did prepare a stat for you today. I wanted to share with you related to messaging. So, you know, we, I, it was a couple of years ago, I don’t remember, it might have been RealPage or one of the big players did a huge study of all these different tenants and landlords. And one of the questions in this large study is, tons of different things but, something that really jumped out to us is that, you know, they asked landlords like, what’s one of the main reasons? What do you think is most important to your tenants? What’s one of the main reasons that your tenants leave? And of course, the tenant, the landlord said things like, location, rent amount, you know, does it have a washer, dryer, whatever.
Conversely, the tenants, the number one thing that tenants said most frequently was communication issues. They would leave landlords because of communication issues. And that like was a huge headline for us. We’re like, my gosh, we can do communication better. We can help these landlords communicate more effectively. That starts throughout Innago, right? That’s automated reminders of rent being due, push notifications in the mobile app. The ability to comment on a maintenance ticket, which we saw a few minutes ago and just say like, hey, did you remember to flip the switch underneath the sink to make the dishwasher run again? Quickly responding to that kind of thing. Those are all fundamental, but also obviously having some means of communicating directly with your tenants is really critical.
And that’s what we have here in Innago. You can do it through email, but you can also do it through chat. This is a terrific feature. Again, I use this all the time. I don’t want to have my sister sometimes texting, my brother sometimes texting, and us not really knowing what’s happening with our tenants. We want a centralized communication channel and we use Innago for that.
So you can look up one of your properties here. You can create a new message and say, OK, I’m going to message Andy. I’m say, “Hey, Andy, any questions about the rental?”. And we can send that to him and he can reply directly here. He gets a push notification on his phone. If he doesn’t see it or doesn’t respond to it, he gets a text message 30 minutes later saying, hey, you got an unread message. Go check it out in Innago. We kind of coach him on, make this the place that you communicate with your landlord. It’s so incredibly useful to be able to communicate effectively with your tenants.
Beau Hamilton (29:37)
So you said that he’ll also get a text message. It’s kind of baked in to connecting with his SMS?
Dave Spooner (29:43)
Yeah, so we don’t offer a full SMS service. You can’t just blast all your tenants with SMS. It’s something we’ve long considered. We will likely do it someday. There’s some challenges there from a cost standpoint, from a management standpoint. But we do have text built into our system. So we try to use it really strategically. So critical reminders go out via text, like if rent is due or if there’s a digital document that’s unsigned, if there’s a particular workflow that’s unfinished, those will all go out through text. If there’s a chat that’s unread, we’re going to text notify the tenant or the landlord that they need to go look at that. So we try to be very strategic to use it, but we really want that communication to occur through the app itself. We think it benefits everybody.
Beau Hamilton (30:24)
Gotcha. OK. Yeah, well, I think, yeah, just communication is so important and from a business standpoint, but also just from a personal relationship standpoint. And I mean, that’s ultimately when you’re living in someone’s home, you want to have that kind of, you have a sort of inherent personal connection with them. So I think that’s great. You’ve got the right priorities here.
Dave Spooner (30:44)
Yeah, exactly. I think this is, if it’s okay, I think it’s a good segue to show you what the tenant side looks like as well. Yeah, so again, we’re trying to build a software, we’re calling ourselves tenant management software. It would be pretty terrible if our tenant experience wasn’t also super user friendly. And I think that’s a place that a lot of these legacy players kind of miss because once they sign up that landlord, they have a contract with the landlord, they’re getting paid by the landlord, the incentive for them to give the tenants a really great experience isn’t necessarily there.
With us, it absolutely is because all of our features are monetized on the tenant side by default. So we need to give those tenants an exceptional experience. And you can hopefully see that in the dashboard. Very clean, very easy to understand, big blue pay button. Currently, this particular tenant, Kevin, he’s got a damage report. So he recently moved in and the landlord wanted him to go around and fill out a damage report. This will go away. So there will be even more focus on that payment option once he’s completed the damage report.
But this is actually a great feature that allows the tenant to go around, take pictures, add descriptions, and then it produces a PDF that they can sign through the app that now you have a standardized damage report that you’ve collected from your tenant. This is something that we would always, this was actually born because I would always forget to do this with my tenants and we’d never have a damage report. And then they’d be like, well, that hole was there when we moved in. And we’d be like, I don’t think so. But I guess we don’t have a damage report, so we’ve got to accept your word for it. So it really makes it easy to streamline this, make it a part of your process, and collect this information up front.
Beau Hamilton (32:17)
Very cool.
Dave Spooner (32:17)
So we got Damage Report, we got Payments, we got Auto Pay. They can enroll in credit reporting. There’s a free version of that that reports to the bureaus and helps boost their credit score with their payments, access maintenance tickets. All of it’s available right here quickly for them. And even better, it’s got an exceptional mobile responsiveness. So this is what it looks like on a phone. Still super clean. Super easy to understand for these tenants.
Beau Hamilton (32:42)
Yeah, super, super minimal. And yeah, that’s very cool.
Yeah, I think that’s deep that we’re seeing this because you know, we we focus on the the tenant and or the landlord side of things so it’s nice to see the other the flip side and I don’t think I, you know, I don’t think we, I reiterated that that important distinction that you have these both these two way, two interfaces, you know, so that the customers can see and get some real use out of this as well.
Dave Spooner (33:12)
Yeah, exactly.
Beau Hamilton (33:14)
Now, what is your, I mean, I asked this with the other viewpoint, but what would you say is your favorite feature on this dashboard, if you have one that stands out? I know you talked about some of the maintenance and lease and files, but is there any particular feature that stands out right here?
Dave Spooner (33:31)
Yeah, so on the tenant side, I would say, I think the, honestly, I think the credit thing is really such a great offering for them to be able to, for a lot of these tenants, for a lot of people that are renting, it’s their biggest expense by a mile. They say 30, 40, for some people, unfortunately, 50% of their income is going towards rent. That’s huge. There’s nothing else that’s gonna come close to that. And the ability to build on your credit so that you can hopefully buy a house someday, get a more affordable car, just get a better loan, is incredibly valuable.
So it was important to us to offer that to tenants. There’s a couple different versions of this. There’s a free one and a premium. The premium just has a few additional bells and whistles, but we encourage people to sign up for the free one at the very least to get some of those benefits. So I think it’s a great feature. I think, you know, it’s just an addition for these tenants and something that you can, as a landlord, go to your tenants and say, hey, we’re super excited about this new software. It’s going to make your life easier because of auto pay and because of reminders and because of communication. But it’s also going to allow you to build up your credit score and get like a real direct benefit from using this thing.
Beau Hamilton (34:37)
Right. Okay, yeah, that makes sense. And I just generally, like the, like you said, big blue buttons, easy to find. You have the bell notification icon. Yeah, very user-friendly.
Dave Spooner (34:48)
Yeah.
Beau Hamilton (34:50)
Now, is there anything else you want to talk about on the landlord side of the platform? Or, you mentioned…
Dave Spooner (34:57)
Yeah, you know, we covered a lot of ground. We hit a lot of good stuff. Again, I hope the takeaway is that it’s really simple, it’s really intuitive, but there’s also a depth in these features. It’s not a lot of complexity. I guess to that point, I will show you late fees really quickly. So this is a great example of this. This is not an overwhelming screen. This is a very simple screen. There’s a lot going on here. You can select your late fee type, flat fee, percentage fee, etcetera. You can enter it and set your grace period. You can make it repeating. You can say how frequently it repeats, if it ever ends. And then we give you a little summary explaining exactly what the behavior of that late fee is going to be so that it’s crystal clear to you and crystal clear to your tenants.
Then you can decide how you apply this late fee. Most people say only items labeled rent, right? But some people have in their lease that all line items on rental invoices should be considered part of late fees, right? So like if they have a parking fee that’s charged every single month of $50 bucks and it’s a separate line item, which you can do in Innago, recurring fees like that, we’ll charge a late fee if they’ve paid the rent, but not the parking fee. And then some people even say, like, anything that’s late gets a late fee. So we’re going to do this on all invoices. You can do it on a per tenant basis. There’s a lot of depth here. There’s a lot of complexity available to you. But it’s laid out in a way that is sort of piecemeal, one thing at a time, that makes it really digestible, really understandable.
And the other cool thing that you can do here is once you’ve created a late fee, you can create a second late fee, and you can stack them. So if you are a landlord that has, you know, a $20 late fee on the third of the month, and then they’re going to be charged 1% of outstanding balance every day from the 10th onward, that’s a pretty complicated late fee. You can do it in Innago, no problem at all.
Beau Hamilton (36:34)
Okay. Very cool.
Dave Spooner (36:36)
So there’s a certain elegance to it, there’s a simplicity to it, but it also has that depth to allow landlords to do what they need to do.
Beau Hamilton (36:42)
Yeah. Okay. Very cool. Yeah. And you see, I see the FAQs. You have a lot of information on the right-hand side of the screen too.
Dave Spooner (36:49)
Yep.
Beau Hamilton (36:50)
Very cool. So, okay, we did cover a lot of ground. You mentioned the late fees. You’ve mentioned the messaging. I think that’s really one of my standout features, actually.
Where do you, I don’t know, where do you see this product going? Because you mentioned you have weekly release cycles, weekly updates. Obviously, you don’t want to put a hard timeline of things to expect because you want to give your developers time to work on features and iron out bugs and stuff. But where do you, where do you see this product going in the short to long term?
Dave Spooner (37:23)
Yeah, this is, this is a great question. I think this is a question that we think about all the time. We really believe in product-led growth. If you build it, they will come. So most of our budget goes towards our product. We are very committed to making it better and better and better. But I think this is a question that trips up a lot of products. And I think the reason is there’s a concept, and you’re probably very familiar with it, there’s a concept in product development called feature creep, where you just kind of start throwing everything but the kitchen sink at your product because they’re like, well, this person wanted it, so throw it in there. This person wanted it, so throw it in there.
We try to be very, very deliberate, you know, central to what we’re offering here is a simple, easy to understand, easy to digest, easy to use software that gets things done for you. So if we just throw everything at it, we’re going to end up like a lot of other softwares unfortunately have where it becomes too clunky, it becomes too overwrought, it becomes difficult to use. So we are very deliberate. So a lot of times when we’re investing in software development, we’re investing in refinement, we’re investing in improvement, making things faster, making things more seamless, ironing out wrinkles, adding depth on features. So you’ll see a lot of that, always, always getting better.
Now, that being said, there are features we’re really excited about that are coming down the pipeline. One is an announcement feature. It’s kind of a companion to the chat and messaging features we already have. So this would be, you know, for example, a landlord could blast out to all their properties on Main Street and say, hey, they’re doing work on the water main. Water is going to be out for three hours today. And send it out, push notification, text notification, announcement in their dashboard sticky to the top that says here’s what’s going on.
You could also use it, you know, if you’re in student housing, for example, and you want to say like barbecue at the quad or whatever on Friday and you can enable comments and you can enable interaction and people could say like I’m going to be there like this sounds great. Thanks for doing this or whatever. You can create that community feel. So the announcements page and the announcements board is something we’re really excited about that will be coming.
And then one other feature for you is, you know, again, we’re focused on that tenant management piece. We are very limited in the accounting tools that we offer, and that is very much by design. We’ve got income. We’ve got expenses. You can produce a P&L. That’s all great, but we’re not full-end accounting software. Instead, we know that’s something that landlords need, but something they don’t interact with very often. So we choose to provide accounting through integrations. We have a great QuickBooks integration in Innago that you can go to, connect your QuickBooks account or multiple QuickBooks accounts, and we’ll feed data into it.
We’re also really excited we’re launching partnership with a new accounting platform called Ledgre. That’s L-E-D-G-R-E. They like flip the E and R, I think, for real estate. And they are, they’re really focused on landlords, you know, QuickBooks isn’t. QuickBooks obviously is the 700 pound gorilla that many, many people use, but it’s not designed for landlords. And there’s some, there’s some weird little idiosyncrasies you have to get around. Ledger is going to be designed for landlords from the ground up. And we’ve been a primary design partner for them. So we’ve had a huge voice in helping them build that platform and making sure it works really well with Innago. And we’re so excited that that’s launching. I think it’s launching like this week. We’re in January right now. And we think it’s going to be a great feature.
We really want to build out this integrations page, so those things that we’re not really interested in doing for you, because they may be things that you do infrequently and we feel will potentially jeopardize the value that Innago is bringing you, that we can still offer you integrations that give you that value elsewhere. And QuickBooks is a huge part of that and Ledger is gonna be a huge part of that moving forward.
Beau Hamilton (40:49)
Very cool. Yeah, I think there’s a lot of opportunities for even more partnerships in the future. yeah, I think it’s exciting to see. And I’ll definitely be watching along. Just generally speaking too, I’ll say, as a sit-in resident landlord myself, I think there’s a lot of value from this platform. I might have to give it a try myself.
Dave Spooner (41:09)
Yeah, I appreciate that.
Beau Hamilton (41:11)
Now before we sign off, where can viewers, you know, go to learn more about Innago, get in touch with your team, and maybe schedule a personal demo of their own?
Dave Spooner (41:20)
Yeah, so our website’s obviously a great place to start. It’s I-N-N-A-G-O, two N’s there. So you can go there and reach us. We have a direct support line, a direct sales line. We really want to be in touch with customers. We try not to bury our phone numbers. So if you Google, like, “Innago Support”, it’ll pop right up for you, that phone number. We want people to see that. You can email our sales team if you want to schedule a demo, sales@innago.com, or again, go to the website to get something scheduled.
And a lot of people call me crazy, but I like to give out my personal direct email. I love getting questions. I love talking to landlords. I love getting that direct feedback. So you can reach me at dave@innago.com and I promise you, I will reply to you hopefully quite quickly too.
Beau Hamilton (42:04)
Awesome. Okay. That’s dave@innago, I-N-N-A-G-O.com. Awesome. Well, hey, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to sit and talk with us about Innago. That’s Dave Spooner, CEO and Co-founder. Thank you. Appreciate it.
Dave Spooner (42:19)
Yeah, thanks, Beau.
Beau Hamilton (42:21)
Thank you all for watching this product demo showcase. I’m your host, Beau Hamilton, Senior Editor and Multimedia Producer. Make sure to subscribe to stay up to date with all of our upcoming B2B software related podcasts and product demos. I’ll talk to you in the next one.