EZ Rent Rental Listing Website Case Study
Streamlining the way landlords find tenants in Vancouver
Overview
This project idea came from seeing my neighbours struggling to find a compatible tenant under the strict BC tenancy law which allows a tenant to live in a household indefinitely despite the contract being over.
For the scope of this project, we focused on secondary renting units such as basements, rooms and suites.
Timeline
October 2023 (2 weeks)
Team
Joanne Kim
Yenan Huang
My role
Lead design, user research, user persona, project management, prototyping, usability tests
Helping landlords find their ideal tenant
Reimagining the way landlords screen for compatible tenants through comprehensive tenant profiles and authenticated reviews.
Review comprehensive tenant profiles
A single profile that encompasses all the information landlords already ask for such as age, gender, profession, references and payment history.
Verify tenants’ background with authenticated reviews
Users are required to upload a digital copy of their contract with the landlord / tenant they want to rate in the review form and based on their profile and contract details, EZ Rent will check if the review is genuine or not.
Enable document access for select landlords
Tenants can protect their sensitive information through a messaging feature which grants the selected landlord instant access to the complete profile, including references and rental payment history.
Problem space
British Columbia has one of the strictest tenancy laws and highest fines in Canada
Although the law protects tenants from being evicted through mandates such as having to compensate the tenant with 12 months rent in the case of wrongful evictions, no laws protect landlords from bad tenants who don’t pay their utilities or damage their rental units.
Primary research
Landlords could pay expensive fines for reasonable evictions
reasonable ≠ legal
Under the status quo, landlords are unable to terminate a tenancy agreement unless :
In B.C., a tenant is not required to vacate the rental unit when their lease ends as it automatically turns into a month-to-month lease with no end date. Even at the end of a contract, landlords have no right to ask a tenant to vacate the rental unit even if the tenant is not complying with the rental policies.
Understanding the user stories
We recruited and interviewed 4 landlords and 4 tenants from Vancouver through Google meet to understand their user journey and pain points when looking for / listing housing rentals online.
Tenant background checks are time-consuming but crucial.
“So, yeah, a lot of [tenants] are quite smart and I think my next door neighbour had a heck of a time trying to get rid of a tenant…I've heard about the tenancy law and it's a huge hassle to deal with”
[landlord, male, 58]
“Credit check. History check. This is a necessary step”
[landlord, female, 59]
For landlords it’s information about tenants, for tenants it’s price and location of the property.
“What I care about the most is like price, square footage and like how nice it is. I signed with a rude landlord anyway, because the location was good”
[tenant, male, 26]
Competitive analysis
Our competitors only provide information about the rental unit
We conducted a competitive analysis of 4 of the most popular property rental listing websites in Vancouver; Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, Kijiji and Rew.
Most of the rental listing sites are designed for tenants, not landlords. The filter options and descriptions primarily focus on the physical aspects of the properties.
Facebook marketplace is the most streamlined rental listing website
However, there are opportunities for improvement
Facebook Marketplace is popular amongst landlords because it lets them see the tenants’ profiles to establish first impressions. However, stalking is limited if the tenant’s profile is private and the reviews are not relevant to renting.
This forces landlords to ask tenants to introduce themselves such as their name, gender and profession under the description of a listing.
How might we simplify tenant background checks and reduce the landlords’ workload?
Ideation
A comprehensive tenant profile
Tenants can create a unique profile which includes all the relevant information and documents that showcase their rental history.
A detailed profile makes it easier for landlords screen for compatible tenants and lets tenants submit multiple applications at once.
Solution
Create a single profile and apply to multiple listings at once
Describe your best qualities
Tenants can add qualities and strengths about themselves to help landlords identify their ideal and compatible tenants more efficiently. Based on my research, landlords typically seek tenants who are clean, quiet, and either enrolled in post-secondary school or employed full-time.
Upload references
Tenants can upload documents such as their professional references or references from past landlords. Uploading these documents are optional, but highly recommended as it can increase a tenant’s credibility and chances of securing the rental unit.
Solution
Streamlining the experience of finding tenants for landlords
Dashboard for Landlords
Landlords can keep track of all their listings, messages with tenants through their dashboard. This helps landlords stay organized and keep track of all the tenants that inquire about the listings.
View tenant’s profile & rental history record from chat
Upon a tenant’s inquiry, the landlord can view the tenants’ completed profile directly from the chat. The tenant’s profile includes professional references and relevant background information. This can significantly reduce the landlords’ workload of conducting background checks on potential tenants.
Helping landlords find compatible tenants
Users can leave ratings for past tenants and landlords through a detailed review form. This feature primarily allows landlords to get a better idea of the tenant’s rental history.
Solution
How might we ensure that the reviews are authentic and come from actual landlords and tenants?
During the user interviews, landlords expressed that they would need some sort of verification to know that the reviews are actually genuine.
“So I would question how that's done, right? Because even when I call landlords, they're you know, so-called references. Like is this the real landlord?…So there's that verification process that has to be accurate,”
[landlord, 58, male]
On Facebook Marketplace, a buyer can rate the seller, even if they didn’t actually purchase from them.
As long as the seller indicate that they sold their item on FB marketplace when taking down the item, all the buyers that inquired about that item are given the option to review the seller. This is why sellers can have fake reviews on their seller profile without an authentication process.
Why review verification matters
It's indispensable to verify the authenticity of reviews to avoid situations where someone tries to deceive others by having a friend write a fake positive review for them. To prevent this, users are required to upload a digital copy of their contract in the review form and based on their profile and contract details, Craigslist will verify whether the review is genuine or not.
Review status update
Users can see the status of their review on their dashboard. Once a review is authenticated and approved it will be posted on the tenant/landlord's profile. However, if the review doesn't pass authentication because of a wrong contract or mismatched information, it won't be posted.
Moderated usability test
According to the usability test, some tenants feel uncomfortable exposing their personal information.
Protecting users’ private information
We brainstormed many different solutions to give users the flexibility to hide / unhide their sensitive information. Early in the ideation phase, we thought of making the references password-protected or adding a flexible toggle feature to hide and unhide the users’ private information. Ultimately we decided on adding a messaging feature which grants the selected landlord instant access to the complete profile including the references and payment history.
From the landlord’s perspective
In order for the tenant to enable document access for landlords, the user can click on the document icon which will then lead to a pop-up message. Once the consent is given, the landlord will be notified and will have immediate access to the documents.
From the tenant’s perspective
Reflection
Vancouver is currently facing a severe housing crisis and unfortunately, the situation is exacerbated by a shortage of affordable housing and a competitive rental market, where the prices are comparable to that of New York.
As I delved deeper into my research for this project, it was disheartening to hear how a single unpleasant experience with a bad tenant could ruin their entire renting experience, leading some landlords to stop renting out their basements entirely.
In a city like Vancouver secondary rental units, such as basements are invaluable for lower-income households who simply cannot afford to pay $3k+ for apartment rentals and are struggling to find affordable living options. I hope that a tool like EZ Rent becomes prominent in the market to aid landlords in filtering out the bad apples and find compatible tenants to continue providing these crucial accommodation options to those in need.
If I had more time…
For this project, we focused on renting out partial units like bedrooms, suites, and basements instead of independent units such as apartments. We discovered that most conflicts between tenants and landlords occurred when they shared the same living space. If I had more time, I would be interested in researching whether this tool could be useful for independent apartments and even expanding it for finding roommates.