We sat down with long time partners, Darwin Homes, and were able to get some valuable insight into their experience with SiteCapture to this point, some of the features that they have found most helpful over the years, and any potential new features they would like to see SiteCapture come out with next.
Introduction to Darwin Homes
Darwin Homes is a residential property management company driven by technology with the goal of improving the rental experience for both renters and owners. Originating in Austin, Texas about three and a half years ago, they have since expanded to over 20 rental markets across 14 states.
“We’re experiencing some pretty exciting and impressive growth compared to last year.”
The fast-growing company does not own assets, they simply manage them on behalf of its owners. They serve owners who do not want to deal with day-to-day residential management. Darwin Homes takes over the responsibilities of finding tenants, completing work orders, maintaining the homes, collecting rent, and more.
“Property owners come to us to do the nitty-gritty for them and they get to collect a paycheck every month.”
Darwin Homes’ Head of Field Operations, Tyler Clay, relies on the SiteCapture app for property tracking, inspections, maintenance and more. SiteCapture allows for quick and accessible photo storage and tracking of inspections, construction, and maintenance for property management. It can be easily integrated into existing company systems.
Easy to Integrate
I learned about SiteCapture from a previous company I worked at. Since we launched SiteCapture there, I had used it pretty extensively. When I joined Darwin, we didn’t have a great inspection app yet and I knew SiteCapture could fill the gap to meet our needs. I was able to launch it quickly without a need for engineering support. Our engineers were busy with other projects and I knew it was user-friendly enough and I was able to get it onboarded at our company. We did some training and then did a nationwide rollout.
I was able to build it out as I went. Even though it was a manual approach, it was still pretty user-friendly. I had some frontend experience with SiteCapture but I didn’t really have backend experience, as far as creating the templates and building out what we needed for our backend infrastructure. As our next step, we are looking forward to integrating our internal systems with SiteCapture via API so they can coexist and play off of one another.
Great Customer Service and Interface
SiteCapture customer support was a great resource for me while I was working on implementing their app to fit our needs at Darwin Homes. Robin and Lauren have both been really great to work with. We can jump on a call and hash out any issues or questions I have. They have been very responsive. I am very pleased with the support I have gotten from their team. I would absolutely recommend SiteCapture! It is a great tool for smaller companies that don’t have the engineering resources or the desire to create their own product. It’s highly customizable. Again, they are responsive to problems and concerns which is really important to me.
I have really enjoyed working with their team, even past the initial phase. They are immediate to respond and if they don’t know the answer they are quick to create a support ticket for me and get my issues solved in a timely manner. I’m happy with the support I’ve gotten from their team. The app has great capabilities. Other giants in the field end up creating their own app or system but this is great for smaller companies that don’t want to or don’t have the resources to create their own application to fill these needs. It is highly customizable and they are constantly rolling out new features. In addition, if you have any concerns, they are extremely responsive.
Organizational, Filling a Gap in Their Processes for Tracking
My favorite feature is actually a new feature called “Manage Items.” It is still technically in beta, but it is super helpful. You can see work items for a move-out inspection, line items, photos, everything and you can easily select the items you want. This feature makes it really easy to quickly select all of the items that you need to highlight or export to a PDF for your vendor for approval. I really like this feature.
Taking SiteCapture to the Next Level
Something I would love to see would be to have the ability to make some changes, bulk changes, to “Manage Items.” In “Manage Items” you have all the work items listed vertically, in our template that is built out you have the option to say if it’s the landlord or resident responsibility, cost, owner-approved, etc. all of those changes are currently made in the template but I would love to be able to make bulk changes from that “Manage Items” screen. For example, I’m currently looking at 27 work items, sometimes there are 50, 60, and 70 work items. It would be great to be able to make bulk changes directly from the main screen rather than go back into the template. That’s my one thought for making it even better.
