[wholinator2]

How did you feel about all of that personally? What was the culture inside a company like that?

From the outside, i couldn't possibly imagine any person who's ever had trouble making rent playing along while their company was unnecessarily inflicting that pain on large numbers of other people. Yes, when a company is running things they'll do what they can to avoid lawsuits, even if that is "become a soulless algorithmic profit extractor". But businesses are made of people. Was there anyone in the company that had a problem with it?

[anomaloustho]

The loudest part of the company that inflicted pain on people revolved around the background checks. We had a call center dedicated to taking those calls, e.g. “You have a DUI and your landlord doesn’t allow” / “You committed a felony and your landlord says they don’t allow felonies.” - everyone was encouraged to sit on those calls to know what it felt like and have empathy.

Most products centered on whether you actually got a lease or not in the first place (and it was mainly crime related). Once you got into a lease and were struggling to pay rent, anything else would have moved to a manual action taken by the landlord if they wanted to be a soulless jerk. (Not sure about whether Realpage has some kind of automated product for that but we didn’t)

As for competing YieldStar product. Our main objection was that if we were to build price projection software, it’d better reflect the actual market. The algorithm and heuristics like “raise rent on Christmas” didn’t sit well, so we raised the conversation and stalled the project for a few weeks. Eventually we were told we’d get to revisit our concerns in the V2 but we’d be overruled for the time being “just to get out this MVP”.

[margalabargala]

People who write software tend to be underrepresented in the group of people who have had trouble making rent as a working adult. And it's not hard to fill out sales, HR, etc with similar people.