Apartment List~3 min read

A compliance tool had to be safer than doing it by hand.

Three weeks, one engineer, Legal deciding what counted as airtight, and two failed versions before the one that shipped.

  • Role: Product strategy and design
  • Timeline: 3 weeks
  • Team: 1 engineer, me
  • Impact: 80% of clients adopted
  • Platform: Web
0%

Existing clients using the new tool

Against the roughly 1,000 property management companies on the platform, that is about 800. I set the target and read it at three weeks, ahead of the three months Apartment List normally took, and it held through the rest of my time there, to 2024. Still missing: who produced the count, and what it was before.

Overview

I shipped templates with a person checking them, because a confidently wrong tool is worse than none.

Property managers applied state, city, and community rules by hand across whole portfolios. One missing fee or outdated disclosure could trigger a triple-damages lawsuit. Legal was raising alarms.

Worked with: 1 engineer and Legal; enterprise and mid-market property managers in research.

What I owned

I owned

  • The call to template rather than automate, and the risk argument for it: shipping less capability on purpose because the two failure modes cost different amounts
  • Product strategy and design
  • Research with enterprise and mid-market property managers
  • Three versions of the template model, two of which were dead ends
  • The scope model: company, state, and community application levels

Shared with Legal and the engineer

  • Which regulations the templates had to cover, and what counted as airtight: Legal’s call, not mine

Research

Property managers wanted one clear way to apply the rules without redoing it for every lease.

Policies varied by state and city with nowhere to keep them together. Disclosure forms differed across a portfolio. Missing audit trails meant no one could prove what had been applied, or when.

Decision: templates, not automation

A person stays between the system and the filing, because the two ways of being wrong cost different amounts.

I compared automated regulation detection, templates applied at a chosen scope, and a checklist with no enforcement. Doing it by hand is slow, but the person knows they might have missed something and re-checks. Automation removes that anxiety and turns a hedged guess into a confident filing.

Automation would have had to be right on its own, and three weeks could not prove that. I chose templates, and Legal signed off on the actual language.

Decision: explicit scope

The third scope model shipped after two of my own versions failed.

The first bulk-applied rules and did not scale beyond one portfolio shape. The second detected regulations automatically. It solved scale but was not technically feasible. My note at the time said it was too clever for its own good.

The version that shipped lets the author choose, and see, whether a fee, policy, or disclosure applies at company, state, or community level. That adds work per rule across portfolios with hundreds of communities, so I added bulk edits, which partners asked for first.

The fee authoring form, with an “Applicable to” selector offering Company, State, or Community scope.
What shipped: write a fee once, then choose its reach. Company scope applies it to every community in the portfolio.

Redesign

One hub holds fees, policies, and disclosures, written once.

It includes reusable disclosure templates citing the statute, and license status tracked instead of remembered. On the renter’s side, costs and fees are itemized on the listing with the disclaimer attached to the numbers.

Disclaimer templates applied to a listing.
Reusable disclosure templates, each carrying its statute citation.
An overlay surfacing a disclosure in context.
The disclosure appears where the decision is made.
License tracking across properties.
License status, tracked instead of remembered.
Bulk editing compliance settings across listings.
Bulk edits, the thing partners asked for first.

What the renter sees

A listing page for Vesty Park with a Rent Savings banner, a match summary, the leasing office contact, a location map, and an expanded Rental costs and fees section itemising estimated monthly cost of $1,699, monthly rent, parking fee, pet fee, security deposit, and administration fee, closing on a disclaimer that pricing is subject to change.
Costs and fees, itemised on the listing, with the estimate disclaimer attached to the numbers rather than buried in a footer.
The same listing collapsed to a headline price of $2,469 with an estimated rent with specials of $2,234, the fee breakdown hidden, and the space given instead to price and availability filters and four unit cards.
The same listing with the breakdown collapsed. Faster to scan, and the fee total a renter is legally owed is now a tap away rather than on the page.

Scope

Explicit scope and templates shipped, and automatic detection did not.

Cut: automatic detection and the first bulk-apply model. The sequence matters more than the hub. Explicit scope leaves a labeled record of what applies where, which automatic detection would need to be auditable later.

Results

80% of existing clients adopted the tool, which measures adoption and says nothing about anyone’s compliance.

I never had to defend the central argument against someone who disagreed

Both failed versions were mine. Legal never rejected a template, and the push for automatic coverage came from me. I still believe a confidently wrong tool is worse than none. I do not know whether that would have held.

Sam Cusano