LandlordMax Sale 1 Day Left!!
Just a friendly reminder to let you know that LandlordMax Property Management Software is still on sale for $147 until tomorrow (June 30, 2009). As of July 1st, the price will be $189. So if you haven’t already taken advantage of this discount over the month of June, don’t forget to do it now before the sale is over!
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LandlordMax Version 6.05a Has Just Been Released
Just minutes ago we released the latest version of LandlordMax Property Management Software version 6.05a.
This release is mainly a patch release, although we did manage to include one new feature (database compression). For further details on the specifics I’ll refer you to our online release notes, specifically the release notes for version 6.05a (near the bottom of the page).
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LandlordMax Revenues Update
As I’ve done in the past, I’m going to share with you today the latest sales metrics of my company LandlordMax. And just like in my post in June 2008, we’re still heading in the right direction! Below is our Monthly Revenues Graph, as well as our 12-Month Trailing Average Revenues Graph. I find that only showing the monthly graph isn’t enough, the trailing average gives you the all important trend.
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As the graphs clearly show, our sales are definitely increasing. A nice looking hockey stick graph! We’ve been lucky in that the recession has barely affected us.
The only thing that’s odd in the graph is the slowing growth line in 12-Month Trailing Average Sales Graph in the last little bit (the bottom graph). This is because for the last 2-3 months I started to leak the news that a new major version was going to be released any day now. As you’d expect, the news of a new version coming out any day affected our sales (some people decided to hold off purchasing the software until the new version was released, even if we offer up to a year of upgrades with your license). But as you can see from before, we expect the graph to jump right back up, and it’s already starting to do so.
Although the graph’s data isn’t up to today, I can tell you we expect June to be our biggest month yet based on the increased sales we’ve already seen since we released the latest version just 2 weeks ago! It’s always a bit difficult to predict because there’s a delay from when we release a new version to when sales jump up because of the free 30-day trial we offer.
For those of you who might have missed it, back in early 2008 I posted a geographical map with all the cities in US where LandlordMax was purchased during 2007 which you can find below. The thing to note is that this is data from almost 2 years ago (it represents our sales from 2007, today that map would be significantly more populated), and all the nodes represent 1 OR MORE sales (1, 10, 100, 1000, etc. sales in a city are marked with just one node)
As well, if you’re interested I had posted in the past or sales metrics by day of week as well as by day of month. What’s interesting is that our sales level double on weekdays compared to weekends. I suspect this is because about half our customers are individual real estate investors and half are property management companies, banks, universities, etc., which are mainly open on weekdays. Although it seems intuitive in retrospect, it took me a bit to figure out.
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LandlordMax Testimonial
This week, after helping K. Nusbaum, he sent us the following comment regarding LandlordMax:
“Thank you so much for your prompt attention to my problem. You have proven exactly why we stay with your company and will recommend you to anyone! “
To which I asked him if we could use his comment for our testimonial page on LandlordMax. He replied yes, and went even further and added:
“We started LandlordMax back in Aug of 07 and within a month fell in love with the software. I utilized the program to run a 64 unit complex and it did great. In Feb 09 I started running another property with 140 units and now use the updated version (Ver6.05) to run both properties. I recommend the software to anyone in property management. Not only is the software great but the customer service is top of the line. No matter what my problem or question has been LandlordMax has been attentive and prompt to handle it. I have not had many problems thankfully though!”
Thank you for the glowing testimonial! It’s very appreciated.
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LandlordMax Version 6.05 is Now Available!
Great news! We just released the latest major version of LandlordMax (version 6.05) a few minutes ago! If you’re a LandlordMax’er, you definitely want to check it out. Be one of the first people to install it on your computer. There’s a lot of new and powerful features in this release!
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LandlordMax Major Release Coming This Week!
This is one of those posts I’m not sure how to approach, especially being this tired when I’m writing it. You see I was fully expecting to release the latest major release of LandlordMax tonight, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen. Although we don’t have official release dates, we’ve slowly and quietly being letting people know that a release was coming, most likely over the weekend. Again, unfortunately, it’s not going to happen.
The good news is that the new version of LandlordMax is ready to go. It’s actually been ready for almost a full week now. The only thing holding us back is the website, it’s not entirely ready. We’re still working on the release notes, and the user manual definitely needs more work. At the very least I don’t want to release the latest version without a strong News and Newsworthy page like the last release. Although I really hate it, I can accept it if the user manual is trailing behind by a bit. It’s not the end of the world. But we absolutely need a page showcasing the latest features, otherwise it could potentially be confusing to our users. I’d rather give them a good heads up of what’s new, and how some of the new features may affect them (for example a new feature called Advance Notices will have an impact on their existing Scheduled Entries).
That being said, instead of pushing through tonight to the wee hours of the morning, I believe we need a rest (plus we have a key person downtrodden with a bad cold - not me - fingers crossed). I myself have only slept a few hours for the last 4-5 nights, so I’m pretty exhausted. I’m actually hoping this post makes sense when I read it later after I’ve had some rest.
So what I’m going to do instead is take a small breather, and let everyone get some rest before we go live with the new version. We need it! But more importantly, I think it’s important that we avoid making any mistakes releasing a new version of the software. And the best time to make mistakes is when you’re overtired. It’s also the time when people have a tendency to push stuff through that’s of lower quality just to get it over with. That’s not a position I want to be in. I believe the wait will be worth it. I want to avoid making any stupid mistakes. And a few days is not going to hurt anyone. It’s worth the cost.
Although I really don’t like to promise an official release date, I suspect we’ll be releasing mid-week this week.
Thank you for your patience and I look forward to posting when LandlordMax is released!!
PS: Please note that you don’t have to wait for the new version to come out to buy LandlordMax, as part of your license you’re entitled to all releases that come out for up to a year. This includes major upgrades!
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How to Get the Best Possible Technical Support
It’s early Tuesday morning and you’re just entering your trusted car mechanic’s garage because last night your car was really acting up on your way home from work. You don’t know exactly what’s going on, but there’s no doubt that something is really wrong. The mechanic greets you with a smile and asks you what he can do for you to which you reply “my car is broken”.
What do you think happens next? Is this enough information for the car mechanic to help you?
No, not even close. Firstly, what do you mean by it’s broken? Does the car start? Is the windshield broken? Does the car make any noises? Does it rattle? And so on.
Basically the mechanic will first try to get a basic assessment of what’s going on. Saying the car is broken just isn’t enough. It’s much too generic with too many possible meanings. The mechanic needs to know more.
The exact same is true with software technical support. If you truly want to maximize the effectiveness of the help you’ll get from the support department, give them as MUCH RELEVANT information as you can.
For the car mechanic, you could say something like the car makes a loud rattle, but only when I turn. And this only happens if I’m going at least 30 mph or more. I’ve also noticed that it’s coming from the back left section of the car. I just started last night, I hadn’t heard anything before.
When it comes to support, a surprising number of people seem to just say things like “the software is broken”, “it no longer works”, “I can’t use it”, “it won’t let me close”, “it won’t let me enter my data”. All of these are too vague and to do any real troubleshooting with unless there’s more information to give it a context.
For example what does it’s broken mean? Does the software start up? Are you getting an error message? If so what is the error message? Is it a report that’s not generating the results you’d expect? Are you not able to perform a specific task? The list of possibilities are endless.
And please don’t take this post as me complaining about our customers, because it’s not at all about that. I really do appreciate all of our customers. What I’m trying to give here are some tips to help everyone (me included) to get the best support experience possible. And this isn’t just with us, but with every company out there. Not just software, but with anyone you’re trying to get help from. The more context you can give the better your results will be.
Imagine going to the doctors and just saying you don’t feel well. What does that mean? Do you have a headache? Do you have a stomach ache? Are you bleeding profusely (well you would hope that one would be obvious)? Did you bruise something? The list of possibilities are endless. You have to give your doctor some context so that they can help you.
The same is true with technical support. The more context you can give the better your results will be. I know we always appreciate it when people give us more details. And more importantly, it lets us respond immediately without having to send a request for more details. Adding relevant details and context is a win-win scenario for everyone.
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General Update
As you may have noticed, my blog posting frequency has significantly dropped this month. This is because I’m working very hard on the upcoming major upgrade of LandlordMax. We were expecting to release earlier this year, but had to postpone it a bit. Well the release is now imminent. It’s going to be available very soon!
And this is why I’ve been a bit a behind in posting. I also plan on finishing the book publishing series, but it’s going to have to take a bit of a backburner for the release of LandlordMax. I had several request for the two missing parts, so rest assured they’re coming.
With all that said, I’m very excited about the upcoming release of LandlordMax. It’s been too long since our last release, something that’s not going to happen again. It’s not that we weren’t active, actually some of the patches could almost be considered new versions in of themselves! But it’s been too long since the main version number has increased. You can expect to see that happen very shortly.
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Be Careful Where You Buy Your Software
Every once in a while we get someone contacting us asking why they haven’t received their license. In most cases it’s because the spam filters have somehow blocked the email or have sent it in the spam folder and they just missed it. In either of these cases it’s a very easy fix, especially if the email is still in their junk folder (which it usually is). However once in a while it turns out the person tried to buy the software from another website (completely unsanctioned by us) at a very significant discount. And I don’t just mean 10%-20%, I mean up to 70%-80%. Nice discount isn’t it? Maybe a little too nice…
Unfortunately it’s not too nice. In these fairly rare cases it’s from fake websites trying to illegal process credit cards with no intentions on fulfilling the orders. It’s all a fake storefront to just get people to buy whatever (in this it’s software but it could be anything, shoes, tv’s, you name it). As soon as the money is processed, you won’t ever hear from them again. Within a month or so more, the website/domain is completely gone and has moved to another domain/website. I don’t know how they get away from credit card chargebacks and such, but they somehow seem to. And I don’t even want to think what they do with the credit card information!
Now I can understand falling prey to a scam, especially if the price is within a small percentage (say a 10%-25% discount). Even 50% is not unheard of if you’ve been dealing with the site for a long time and/or it has a good reputation. But when a site that you don’t know (the domains have generally been purchased within less than a few months so there’s no way you can know it), that has no SSL certificate (they often state it’s a secure connection on the webpage when it’s completely bogus), and the discount is more than most liquidation sales, doesn’t that make you wonder? Wouldn’t you at least contact the company first to make sure it was legit?
The worse part, at least for us, is that a few of these people who contact us after the fact expect to get a license because they “paid” for the software. Yes I agree they paid something, but it was nowhere near the price and not to us. It’s the same as if you tried to buy a Rolex watch for $100 from a random site and wondered why it was a scam. Then contacting Rolex and demanding that you get a real Rolex watch since you already paid for it. It just doesn’t work that way.
The good news is that we’re generally very accomadating to these people, probably more so than we should be. That is assuming they are courteous and respectful (after all we aren’t the ones that scammed them and we didn’t try to get a riduculous discount). For example, today I was in communication with a gentleman because he was scammed in exactly this way. Because he was so courteous and nice, we helped him out as best we could. Had he been abbrasive and demanding, odds are very high I would given him the Rolex example above and ended it right there. Common courtesy can get you further than you might expect. Remember, we aren’t the ones to blame in this situation. If you buy a Rolex from a street vendor in a shaddy part of town for $100, don’t be surprised if you get taken.
So if you see a version of LandlordMax (especially an OEM version because there is no such thing) selling for a fraction of the real price, RUN!!! RUN AWAY! And it’s not just us, it’s almost every other software out there. If a software (or any other product for that matter) is discounted by more than 50% of it’s normal price and it’s coming from a site you don’t know, RUN! RUN AWAY! If it’s too good to be true, then it probably is too good to be true.
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Sometimes Simple Things Aren’t So Simple
As some of you already know, we’re working very hard to release a new version of LandlordMax Property Management Software in the near future (within weeks hopefully). As you’d expect, you’ll find lots of new and exciting features.
However not all features we wanted to include will make it into this version. For example, we tried to squeeze in a feature to give you the ability to “archive” older data. To give an example, let’s say you have a tenant “John Smith” that’s moved out some time ago, you might not want to see his name appear in the drop down list of tenants anymore. At the same time, you don’t want to delete him because a lot of older data is associated to him (such as all his rents, etc.). Therefore what we came up with is the ability to archive data such as tenants.
Seems simple doesn’t it? Should be easy. But it’s not as simple as it first appears. At least not if you want to keep your software easy to use!
Although I promise I’ll try to keep it as un-technical as I can, I’ll need to be a little technical to explain why it looks so easy at first glance. The obvious changes are that we need to add a property to the tenant to mark it as archived (in both the database and the code). Next we need to add the ability to mark a tenant as archived within the screen with a simple checkbox. Nothing too complex yet. But that’s where the simplicity ends.
You’re probably asking yourself how can it become complex from here. Really, all we have is a checkbox to mark an item as archived. If it’s archived, don’t include it in the list. Simple. Not so. Firstly, in your main list of tenants, do you display both archived and non-archived tenants? If you say just display non-archived tenants you’d be wrong. Before I give you the answer why this won’t work, ask yourself how do you edit an archived tenant if you only list non-archived tenants?
Aha! You can’t! Therefore you have to give your users the ability to see both. But then if you do, you defeat the purpose of having the ability to archive tenants. Well the solution we came up with is to include an additional filter at the top of the list. This way you can see all tenants, or only non-archived tenants. By default you’d of course show all tenants because not everyone will know there are filters when they start to use the software. And if you’re smart, you save the filter settings so that the user doesn’t have to reset it each time they go back to the list view.
That wasn’t so difficult. Of course if it ended there I wouldn’t be writting this would I. The next issue we have to deal with is what happens if someone tries to archive data that shouldn’t be archived. For example what happens if they try to archive a tenant that’s currently living in an apartment? Do you let them? Probably not. So now you have to create rules as to who can be archived and who can’t. Is it as simple as just allowing tenant’s that aren’t currently living in a unit? It would be nice if it was, but it’s not. It’s possible that a tenant has a lease to a unit that they’re not living in (a parking spot, a parent leasing for their child while away at college, etc.). So you can’t assume this. But for now, let’s assume you can ignore all this and just not let a user archive a tenant that’s currently in a unit (we’ll deal with the other issues later).
Have we solved all the issues? No, not yet. In our software we offer a dropdown (combobox) list of tenants on the other data entry screens. So for example, on the workorder screen you can select a tenant from a drop down list for that workorder. This makes life easier as all the tenant’s info is associated with the workorder (for reporting, printing, etc.). By doing this, we’ve just solved the issue of keeping the list of tenants to only relevant tenants (ie non-archived tenants). This is great.
But what about reports? How can we generate reports on archived tenants? Based on our current solution it’s not possible. For a user to generate a report on an archived tenant, they’d first have to un-archive that tenant, generate the report, and then re-archive them. Not very user friendly is it? And if we didn’t care about making life easier for our customers we could do just that. But of course we care, so that’s not an option. This means therefore that we have to alter all the reports that let you select a tenant to give you the option of listing all tenants or all non-archived tenants. Nothing too major, but we also have a lot of reports.
We’re still not done. What data do we use on our reports? On some reports we want to use archived tenants and on others we don’t want to use archived tenants. For example, on the reports that list all accounting entries or cashflow, we want to show all accounting entries regardless of whether or not the tenant is archived. However, when we display a list of tenants, we may or may not want to include archived tenants (another option the user needs to select). The same is true for reports on security deposits, leases, etc. So we need a way to toggle whether or not to include archived tenants.
What about reports grouped by tenant? Again same issue, we need a way to ask the user if they want to include archived tenants or not. Is just asking whether or not to include archived tenants enough? Unfortunately it’s not. Within some reports included in LandlordMax you have the ability to include a date range. For example, you can generate a rent roll report between any start and end date. You can generate a list of leases that will expire within a start and end date. Why am I mentioning this here? Isn’t it just as simple as including the option to include archived tenants or not? No. Well, yes, technically we could ignore this and just leave the responsibility to the user to deal with their own issues.
What do I mean? If someone selects to only display non-archived data isn’t that what they really want? Maybe not. Let’s say I want to generate a report that will list all “Accounting entries grouped by tenant” for last year. What do you think will happen? I might be missing half my data because half my tenants are archived. What about for the year 2001? Odds are pretty high that many tenants would be missing. Do we just ignore this use case and let the user deal with it. Never mind the support requests we may get from people complaining that many of their tenants are missing, especially since the data would appear on reports such as “All accounting entries”.
Assuming you’re still here and reading through this longer post, you can now appreciate how sometimes a simple feature can quickly escalate into a larger and more complex feature. In our case, we were hoping to squeeze in this feature for the next major release but I’ve had to make the decision to push it off. If we don’t, we have to address all of these issues. Well maybe we don’t, but if we want to maintain that we’re the easiest we definitely need to. At least I can’t knowingly release software with these glaring issues incomplete.
I can understand releasing software that’s fully working but missing some features (all software is like that, we can always add more features). For example offering the ability to send emails within the software but not offering a spellchecker is not that terrible (don’t worry we’re going to offer a spellchecker in the next major release). Your users can still send emails, they just can’t spell check. It’s not fun, but it works as expected. However releasing a feature that can allow your users to go into an unstable state (archive tenants that are currently renting your unit) or cause unexpected results is not good. Even if the software is behaving as it should, if the behavior isn’t what people expect there’s an issue.
And because of all this, the ability to archive tenants and other data has been pushed off. Especially when you consider the cost to benefit. The benefit of this feature is that the user doesn’t have to scroll through a longer (sometimes much longer) list of tenants that are no longer relevant. Yes it would be great to shorten this list, and I agree with the people who requested it, it is a much needed feature. But at this time the costs are too high and we’re too close to our release date. These are the hard decisions that no one wants to make but that must be made.
PS: If you ever wanted to know why software is sometimes delayed, this is a perfect example. This is a feature that seemed simple at first inspection but wasn’t. Actually even after some thought it still didn’t seem that complex. It wasn’t until we really started to implement it that we understood the issues and the full scope. And nor could we, how could you know ahead of time. In retrospect it’s easy, but think back to when you first started reading this post. Did you even have the faintest idea of what was coming up?
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