Unlocking Simplicity: How One Product Manager Transformed Complex Leasing Decisions with an Elegant Tool

Sure, so by simple solution, I, I, I guess

Sure. So, I, I, I, I hope that qualifies. If not, you can, you can tell me, but uh what, I had an issue where, uh, just after the previous story, uh, uh, happened where we started getting more and more of these leases, I needed my team to go and have these meetings with these. Uh, head of communities or, or, uh, leasing managers, and they would give them, uh, offers and, and talk numbers with them, but my team didn't really have an easy way to assess whether, uh, such a deal is a good deal or a bad deal. Even if I don't want him to immediately sign off, I didn't want him to get a sense of, is it a good deal to talk about or it's like there's no chance we're ever gonna take it. So, the, the solution was to, to build some sort of uh model or tool which was originally built in, in Google Sheets um that will have the, all, all, all, as many of our, of the financial considerations as possible on the back end, but to the, to the, my team, which would only be just Put in a few important numbers. What is the, what is the rent? What are the average monthly expenses for utilities, uh, what the, are there any other, you know, hidden fees that are in the building, and, and on the other side from, uh, you know, put the address in and then on our end, we would, uh, on, on the other side, I would, uh, the, the back end of the system would run, run the numbers and then give them one clear number at the end which was uh Some sort of, uh, of, uh, you know, appealability, uh appeal, the appeal, sorry, of the, of the property to us, uh, and that, and, and this was a great success because they had a simple tool. They put a few, uh, just 4 or 5 important numbers and they already had a good sense of whether it was probably going to work out or not, which allowed them to do the negotiation much more, much more easily.

Sure. So, on their, on their side, it was uh they were basically in charge of plugging in the the, the expense numbers that were known from, uh, from, from that meeting. What they didn't know and that's what um the model did on the back end is to estimate what would be the revenue of that unit because obviously the, the, the, the, the margin, the Uh, arbitrage between that revenue we can get for short-term rentals and our expenses for long term, this is, this was our bread and butter. So, uh, what was going on in the back end is that from the type of properties that they're putting in, you know, the, the location, the number of rooms and all that, uh, and, and our own experience, uh, and our own data, this was kind of Calculating what would probably be the, the, the, the income for that, uh, for that location and when you put those two together, it was giving them, this is how this appeal, uh, appeal was, was calculated in a way. Uh, and to them, their job was not to, uh, Completely sign it off. This was, this was my job and, and my, uh, head of, uh, head of, um, my head of sales, but at the same time, this was giving them a very quick and easy way to make it a quick decision of whether it's, there's no chance to, no reason to waste my time on this or this is worth exploring. Um, does that answer your question or

Yeah, that's a good question and, uh, what it was, was that, that the people we had in, that we needed to do this groundwork for us to go and meet, and meet the buildings and, and understand uh and, and get all the information and, and, and put it in and do this kind of small talk and relationship building. They did not have the proper background of the, all the all the visibility of the, all the financial pieces of what it means uh to To have such a property profitable because you can have no, uh, very low expenses but still lose money if you're not, if you cannot make money. And they were not in a position that it was possible or fair to them to, to expect them to have this overview of all the different pieces of revenue, income, and estimate what the property would make. It was just not the same group of people and because of that, uh, they became basically, uh, users in a way of, of this complex. Analytics and decision making of whether to take a lease or not, but they needed to do it from the human side of talking to someone and, and this is where the idea of, OK, let's simplify it for them and give them like one number, is it like good or bad, uh, and, and to give them kind of the sense of what, what would be worth pursuing, um, that, that was the rationale behind it.

Sure. So initially what we did was, uh, we, we sent them to, to do the small talk and, and just get the numbers and sending them back to us. We would run all the analysis, uh, like either me or, or my head of sales would run the analysis and then get back to them and say, OK, we think it's, it's good enough, or OK, it's, it's, it's completely pointless. Uh, don't even, don't even continue this conversation. But then we found out that Any of these conversations that we're having were, were useless because uh obviously, these, uh, and you know, the, the, the, the least appealing in apartment is the more likely that they'll try to sell themselves to, to my team. So we had an issue where the team was getting a lot of reach outs and getting excited because people want to work with them, but on the other side, they, we kept getting back to them with like, no, this is not good, not good, and, and it also caused some morale issues and So, it was pretty clear that, that just analyzing them one way and sending someone that doesn't really have a way to, to deal with, with all the numbers and really do the negotiation from an uh a top-level understanding point of view, it was a big issue. Uh, and, and this is where the idea came in, OK, maybe we can do something to give them a good sense at least, uh, whether it's good or bad before we, we run, go and run the numbers really, really deeply.