An Exclusive Interview with Andrews Moses, CEO of Tenantcube

Tenantcube is focused on the integration of AI into the real estate industry

The real estate industry has started leveraging the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning to provide efficient services to property managers, landlords, tenants, and others. AI has helped to build a dedicated platform for real estates like property management software and many more for automating complicated processes. This cutting-edge technology helps to build a strong relationship between landlords and tenants.

Here is an exclusive interview with Andrews Moses, CEO of Tenantcube, where he elaborates how the company integrates AI/ML into real estate to offer property management software for efficient service with a team of real estate expertise.

1. Kindly brief us about the company, its specialization, and the services that your company offers.

Tenantcube offers next-generation property management software and is designed to be an end-to-end platform fulfilling the needs of landlords, property managers, and tenants. The software drastically improves the entire experience of renting and saves time and money spent on traditional methods of rental property management. Tenantcube automates all the processes involved in advertising vacant properties, receiving and screening rental applications, onboarding new tenants, managing maintenance requests, collecting rent, and monitoring finances. Apart from this, it provides an expert team of real estate professionals who offer services like leasing, tenant communication and work order coordination at a very affordable price.

2. With what mission and objectives, the company was set up? In short, tell us about your journey since the inception of the company?

Tenantcube was born as a direct result of the personal experience gained when I unwittingly rented my first property in Canada to an armed robber and drug dealer. I realized that I had made the amateur mistake of trying to save time and not thoroughly vetting the tenant. After a lot of research, I figured out I was not alone. Every landlord had a horror story. None of the enterprise property management solutions wanted to help as any landlord owning less than 200 properties is too small for them. Their chatbots would tell me to come back when he had acquired 200 properties. Landlords and small property managers do not have the right tools to attract and screen tenants. Hence, I decided to use my experience from Zoho and Freshworks to build a solution catering to the needs of under-200 units landlord/property managers.

3. How do you plan to revolutionize the Indian/US market and what are your plans to tap the market?

The team identified a US$2.6 billion gap in the North American market that remains untapped and largely ignored by bigger tech companies. This comprises landlords and property managers who own or manage less than 200 properties. Being in the rental industry in North America is a full-time job that carries a lot of administrative burden and legal responsibilities, not to mention the difficulties of letting properties in a region where tenants have more rights than landlords. Finding the right tenant and onboarding them smoothly is crucial, especially when the landlord owns a single-family home and depends on the rental payments to pay off the mortgage. Tenantcube aims at easing this major burden, by being a single, powerful platform that carries out all of their administrative needs— listing their property, finding and screening the perfect tenant, on-boarding them, collecting rent, receiving maintenance requests, managing finances, etc. It also offers a tenant-focused app that tenants can use both as a repository of valuable personal information, as well as to create applications and submit them to properties they are interested in.

4. AI is projected to be the next market. How is AI contributing to the making of your products and services?

Since its inception, the platform was built and designed with AI and ML in mind. As more customers use the solution, the data becomes powerful. The future promises the ability to connect tenants and landlords by improving their relationships, based on data to enhance the experience and disrupt the traditional methods.

5. Do you also feel that the right kind of talent is a challenge in the industry?

The SaaS boom in India has helped in hiring talented people who have experience in AI/ML. In the founding team, the team has got experienced people who have built AI/ML solutions in the past— this has helped in training the new talent. Adopting AI/ML has become much easier with the solutions available in AWS, and this has provided a head start. Finding people who have experience in the field is challenging, given the overwhelming talent available in India. Zoning in on the right talent has been a tough factor, and Tenantcube is finding creative ways around it.

6. What are the skill sets that you specifically look for while hiring at an initial stage?

The team always tries to hire people with curious minds, ones who would look for creative solutions to a regular problem. It looks for people who have demonstrated out-of-the-box thinking and someone who is comfortable with learning and change. As a start-up, it is constantly finding new ways to serve customers, hence having a team that's comfortable with change is very important.

7. How are disruptive technologies like AI/machine learning/cloud computing impacting your industry?

Being an industry steeped in tradition, not a lot of people are storing data in a way that helps in making better decisions. This traditional industry is just adopting digitalization in most cases. Hence, building a platform to enable digitalization along with storing and using data to change the entire experience of renting is disruptive.