Looks like the site is still in beta.

This product is currently in Beta and should not be treated as general availability. Please report any problems via the Feed back link.

First thing I tried to do was a search of homes for rent.

I went to select a state like Colorado and the state pulldown menu did not work.

Since that didn’t work, I tried just hitting the search button and found a house that belonged in Atlanta out off the coast of Mexico. Oops!

Looks like their database is still contaminated with testing data (Unless Epic River is now doing property management).

Looks like it is still Alpha and not Beta yet. Looks like NARPM still has some work to do. Their pricing page is hard to find and is totally blank. If I recall right they have been working on this site for close to a year now and spent over $200,000 on it – it should be much farther along than this (but I am glad it is not!).

I only looked at the site for 5 minutes and found these issues, I am guessing there are many more. Yes, I guess I am a little bitter about the HomeRentalPros.com site. I just take exception to NARPM creating a competing site to the companies the help fund NARPM.

The end of the first quarter is almost over and the RentalHomePros site has not launched. If they don’t launch in the next few days they will need to update their site saying ” launching 2nd qtr”.

Update: They did update their site and now it says June.

Zilpy.com is a site that provides a lot of rental information could hurt RentHomePros even before they launch in a few months.

Even if RentalHomePros generates more accurate data than Zilpy.com, Zilpy appears to have some deep pockets (partnered with Zillow) and can kill them on the shear volume of information of rental info. Even if NARPM can get all 2,000 property managers to particapate it will be less information than what Zilpy already appears to have.

Check out Zilpy’s mapping which is pretty nice – a lot of money has been spent on the development of this site.

Zillow has pretty much become a household name so RentalHomePros is going to have a up hill battle.

NARPM (RentalHomePros) wants the news reporters to come to them for data on rental markets, but think reporters will head to a source that has more volume of data – even if it is not as accurate.

The new RentalHomePros.com is now up with a message that more is coming soon.

Judging how they have worded the page it appears beta is starting soon and the public release will be in the 1st quarter of next year.

Their logo looks strangely similar to the old RentClicks logo when they started.

They are also referring to themselves as RHP, which might not be a good idea since RentalHomesPlus already is being called that (at least on this blog).

From the 8 page PDF about the new www.RentalHomePros.com site from NARPM:

It costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to create and customize the RHP system.

Wow! Ah, let me clarify that – WOW!

It costs me zero dollars to create RentVine, but it took me 700 hours to develop and test it.

For comparison sake, let’s say that RentVine is comparable to www.RentalHomePros.com in complexity, and let say that “hundreds of thousands” means $200K.

$200,000 divided by 700 hours is $286 an hour!

Instead of creating it from scratch, NARPM could have purchased the foundation of the site for $149 just like www.RentClicks.com did when they started.

In my opinion it will take NARPM many many years to pay off this number.

Did NARPM pay too much?

I was reading through the 8 page www.RentalHomePros.com PDF and they included a nice NARPM chart that I thought was neat:

Distribution Of Number Of Units Managed for NARPM Members:

1-99 units – 42%

100-249 units – 31%

250-499 units – 17%

500+ units – 10%

From the NARPM news page:

“Region I Vice President Mike Nelson has resigned his Board of Directors position so he can focus his full attention directing the new Rental Home Professionals, Inc.”

I contacted Mike and asked him about his shift within the NARPM organization and he wrote back:

“During the most recent NARPM board of directors meeting I pointed out that I could serve as a Director, or I could continue as the RHP committee chair, but I could not do both. I still have a company to run. The board decided they would prefer for me to remain as the committee chair for RHP for now and they would find a new Director for NARPM for 2008. As I explained in our phone conversation the other day, NARPM is the owner and only shareholder in RHP. While I expect I will serve as the first President of RHP and one of the 5 board members of RHP, this is an unpaid position just like the leadership positions within NARPM. One of our top priorities is to find and hire professional staff and management to run RHP (and I will not be one of these people). Once full time management is in place, the time obligation for the RHP board members should be significantly reduced.”

Mike Nelson (NARPM Chapter Communications Chair) with Excalibur Home Management presented NARPM’s new for-profit subsidiary called Rental Home Professionals, Inc. at the NARPM national conference in Scottsdale.  See the video above, which I took at that event.

Please excuse the poor video quality. I should have brought my tripod and gotten an audio feed.

Mike Nelson and NARPM were nice enough to give me permission to publish this presentation on RentVine.com.

This is the big news I was referring to in a previous post.

From Mike’s presentation, RentalHomePros.com will be launched around January of 2008.

I would to like to hear your comments.