Propify (YC W23) – Property Management System API Aggregator

Hey HN, we are Remen, Ben, and Nick, the founders of Propify (https://getpropify.com), an API aggregator for residential property management. We abstract over archaic APIs and merge them into a single modern API for the real estate industry, giving companies access to multiple property management systems (PMSs) via a REST API. Think merge.dev or Plaid for real estate.

Property managers nowadays use software to operate residential rental properties. Our customers are not these property managers directly, but companies who provide services to both property managers and renters. Our customers are solving problems around resident screening, security, parking, maintenance, etc., which property managers typically outsource.

Compared to most other industries in 2023, property management still runs on old tech with bad/wrong/absent API documentation. Creating and maintaining integrations with these systems is incredibly painful (1999 called and wants to tell you about its cool new SOAP technology!)

As an example of what we’re solving for, one prospective customer told us they regularly get 503 (service unavailable) errors from one of these PMSs at the beginning of each month because the system can’t process rent payments and other requests at the same time. We address challenges like this using an exponential backoff retry strategy.

We abstract over all these APIs to give our customers software they can reasonably use. Our goal is to eliminate old tech, poor docs, and unreliable infra for our customers so they can focus on delivering value instead of fighting with integrations.

We offer a tested RESTful API with accurate documentation and modern architecture that we can scale. In addition, we want to make the developer experience as good as possible with things like webhooks, SDKs, websockets, and even a GraphQL API (coming later this year).

Before Propify, we built a rent payment app to bridge the technology gap between renters and landlords. Then we encountered the pain of PMS integrations and decided to pivot and solve that problem instead.

dang suggested that we include a product demo or video but since our core product is an API, there’s not that much to show—sorry! But our docs are here: https://docs.getpropify.com/, and if you’re working/interested in this space and have your own credentials for one of our supported integrations, we’ll be happy to get you a sandbox account and a demo.

This industry has been stagnant because of the barrier to entry for integrating with these vital PM systems. Our goal is to unlock innovation by pulling real estate tech into the modern world. Developer experience is incredibly important to us, and we are actively looking for areas where we can improve. We welcome your feedback, questions, and comments!