America Runs on Rent Manager

Here’s a recent conversation between me and an IT rep from Rent Manager:

It’s a system-wide problem.  We are working to correct it.

Can you give me an ETA?

We are working to fix the problem.

Can you give me a ballpark estimate?

It will be fixed quickly.

Could you give me your best estimate of how quickly?  Are we talking minutes, hours, days or weeks?

Can I put you on a brief hold?

Of course.

I listen to some cheesy hold-music while the rep either checks with his manager or goes off to take a piss and wash his hands.  I reflect that the Brits refer to people on the front line as being ‘at the coal face’.  Maybe he is checking with someone at the coal face.  After a few minutes, the hold music switches off and the rep comes back on.  He says,

It will be fixed quickly.

A friend who used to work in IT on Wall Street told me once that traders will call you in the middle of the night and tell you that they need something fixed.  If you tell them that you can fix it in five minutes, they will say, ‘If I needed it fixed five minutes from now, I would have fucking called you five minutes from now’.  I think, ‘Have I become like that?’ and then, ‘Who gives a fuck?  I am paying for this.’  I keep my voice even and say,

How quickly?  Are we talking minutes, hours, days or weeks?  I know you can’t predict the future, but someone at the coal-face should be able to give a good-faith estimate.

All I can say is that it will be fixed quickly.

I consider going all trader on the guy.  Instead, I say,

Thank you.

Is there anything else I can help you with?

No.

The issue would not have been so pressing if it had occurred with a different software provider.  I had already called Rent Manager once that day because I had had trouble logging in.  I called the second time because the water bills that I had posted on October 28 had disappeared from residents’ accounts.  The problems worried me, because all of the information I have about my parks – revenue, expenses, vendor contact information, rent roll, posting dates, bank account balances, payroll – is contained in Rent Manager.  I need the information in Rent Manager to run my business.  If I can’t run my business, I get antsy.

I am not unique in this regard.  Rent Manager is the market-leading property management software for the manufactured housing industry.  Pretty much everyone uses Rent Manager.  We all depend on it.

America runs on Dunkin.  The manufactured housing industry runs on Rent Manager.

Rent Manager is an excellent program.  For $150 a month, I get a full accounting suite, electronic payments, an API that feeds water meter readings directly into the accounting software, a web portal that allows applicants to apply online and residents to check their statements and pay online, a mobile app that lets them do same from their phones, and good product support.  Since it sits in the cloud, my managers and I can all work off the same records, eliminating the problem of conflicting drafts.  And it is robust.  Like a penguin exploring the submerged portion of an iceberg, each time I use it, I learn another useful feature that I had not previously known about.

Although apartment, self-storage and single-family owners can also use Rent Manager, it grew up around the manufactured housing space and because of that, it is uniquely adapted thereto.  The founder was born in Ohio, where his father owned mobile home parks.  He helped his father manage the family properties when he was in high school, majored in computer science when he went to college, and developed an automated system of keeping track of rents and other charges.  The rest is history, as written by the actions of great men, meth-heads, dangerous-breed dogs and lot-rent accruals.[1]

The problem is – I don’t have redundancy.  This is quite different from the situation with, say, documents that I create using Word or Excel.  When I type Microsoft documents, every file is simultaneously saved to my local hard drive and to Google Docs.  If the web goes down, I have my computer.  If I lose my computer, I have my Google account.  If I were to lose my computer in a bomb blast that knocked out the Web – well, I would be fucked, but I would probably be too busy fighting off zombies to worry about drafts of old blog posts. 

By contrast, if Rent Manager goes down, my entire back-office goes down.  I do not think I am alone in this regard.  If Rent Manager sneezes, the manufactured housing industry catches a cold.

A few hours before I called the Rent Manager product support hotline yesterday, I received an email from the credit union where my park in northern New York banks, saying that some customers were having trouble with their debit cards.  The cards could still be used for point-of-sale purchases, but they were acting up in ATMs.  I didn’t think much about the email when I got it because I rarely use that debit card, but when Rent Manager started acting up, I snarfed my kombucha and pondered scenarios.  Were the Russians attacking our financial networks?  Had the Mainland Chinese or the North Koreans launched an info-bomb?  The answer to those questions might reasonably have been, ‘Yes, but that happens all the time.  That’s why places like Rent Manager hire white-hat hackers’.  Hostile states and criminals are always probing for weaknesses.  Small earthquakes and floods happen every day.  We insure against them and we repair damage therefrom.  But the big one could happen.  You want some kind of contingency plan for when it hits.  I have not found that yet, for this particular risk.  I encourage the development team at Rent Manager to work on something to address this.  They put out such a great product – it would be a shame to lose it all in a zombie apocalypse.

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[1] The company is still based near Cincinnati.  Tech support is, generally, responsive and helpful.  I have noticed that many of the reps have a regional accent that causes them to pronounce the word ‘pull’ as [pool], which confused me the first few times we spoke (‘You need to pool the numbers from the application into the contact info’, e.g.).  Some departments are better staffed than others.  For a while, the Tenant Web Access help desk was manned by a woman with something of an attitude, who I tried to avoid.  A couple of weeks ago, I had a long conversation with a very smart woman with a slight Slavic accent who works in Electronic Payments, who made me wish that the chats were augmented by video, candle-light, and maybe a little wine.