• A bit about history

http://www.WeLocateRentals.com/ was a project that I started working on in August of 2010. It all began in my apartment complex. I happened to be in the complex office using their computers. I noticed that the guy next to me was having some Internet connectivity issues. So I offered to help him. He asked me what I did for a living and I said web development. That guy, Tim Hyatt, had mentioned that his uncle needed to build a website. His uncle has properties and land over in New Jersey and Philadelphia so he wanted a website to help him rent his own properties and that of his friends. So I took his uncle’s phone number and called it up. At that point, we did not have a clear and concise idea of how we would build the site or what features would be available. What we knew is that we wanted to post properties ONLINE and have people go there to see pictures.

• More ideas

From that idea, we began to develop it into a much bigger idea. Remember, always THINK BIG. Initially, my boss had the vision to build http://www.WeLocateRentals.com/ for the New Jersey area. He wanted it to be localized. I had brought it up to him that if were going to do it for the New Jersey area then why not do it for the other 49 remaining states? We could target it nationwide. That’s when the idea of “Franchisers” came up. We would still build the website to target local areas but we would set it up in a way that states could function as their own Franchisers. Basically, the idea was to build a search engine that would let people search properties nationwide as well as in specific areas of interest. Each state would work as it’s own Franchiser and each Franchiser would have a designated Agent. Pretty cool. So we have Agents for the state of Florida, New Jersey and Philadelphia. When someone posts a property for any of the aforementioned states, the Agents phone number shows up in the property profile. When a renter finds that property and calls it up, he/she goes through an Agent. That Agent then closes the deal between the landlord and the renter. We get to keep the 1st month’s rent for connecting the landlord with the renter.

• More features: Landlords and Renters

We are working to offer more services for paid members. For example, landlords will able to run background checks right from http://www.WeLocateRentals.com/. Landlords will able to fill out lease forms, waivers, renewals and eviction forms right from their accounts. We plan to offer a way for renters to pay their rent dues from our website. There will be automatic e-mail reminders and late fee notices. If the renter needs to be evicted, we will have ONLINE eviction forms ready to be filled out by landlords. There will be a section for suggested lawyers as well. Landlords can also pay an additional fee to have their properties show in the Featured section for a certain period of time. More like Google does with paid links up top. For renters, everything is FREE. They can log in to their accounts and pay their rent dues ONLNE, see a history of all paid rent, due notices, save their preferred properties for later review or even contact landlords like they would in a social network environment. The interesting part of our website is how we let landlords upload their properties and how we let them administer it. They can build a database of properties by filling out a form. Landlords can then upload pictures or choose not too. If a property is rented out, they do not need to delete their property and re-do it again when it becomes available. They just need to check it off the searches. That way, they can enter all their properties and keep it for later exposure. On the landlords page, they can choose default picture and delete specific ones.

• Property Management

We also have plans to offer a section for Property Management people to upload their properties in bulks. Many property management businesses have rentals available. They usually advertise up front on the board.