Rentometer API with Zapier | Tutorial
Looking to use Rentometer's API with limited code? In this video, I'll show you how to use Rentometer with Zapier. This is a great way to create automated processes!
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Transcription
00:00
Hey fellow real estate investors are you looking for easy solution in order to get rent information on a property so that you can evaluate it in your assessment? Well, I'm going to show you how to do exactly that using rent ometer and Zapier. My name is Ariel Herrera with the analytics area channel, we bridge the gap between real estate and technology. If you like simple solutions in order to automate and add systems, then please follow this channel as well subscribe and like our content. Alright, let's get started.
00:40
Great, so right now I'm on rent amateurs homepage. And I have an example here of entering a property. And we are able to get an awesome response back of information on rent. So autometer, what they basically do is they look at comparables. So other properties that have rented in a given timeframe that are similar to the one that you enter, to give you a better idea of what the rent should be. Maybe you're an investor who already has lists of properties, and you're trying to assess what you should increase rents to, or you're an investor that's looking to evaluate multiple properties. So maybe at scale, and you want a quick way to see what the rent should be. So you can calculate other things like the 1% rule, cash flow, and so on. So rent ometer recently released an API several months ago. And the President Mike Lapsley, made an amazing overview of how to utilize the API and a high level. And what I want to do is show you a little bit more granular of other things you could do with this API using Zapier. For those of you that aren't aware of Zapier, it's an amazing tool that allows you to automate different actions across many different applications. So I'm going to jump right into zap that I created. So I create a zap that basically every time I get an email from Zillow. So for example, I have an email set up at looking on properties, river view, Tampa, which is close to the Tampa Bay area in Florida. And what I want to be able to do is say, hey, a new listing just came out. I have information in the email, like the price, the number of bedrooms, baths, and the address. But every time I get this email of a new listing, I want to quickly assess what the rent should be and calculate some things based off of that. So this is basically taking a secondary step. So what Mike already did in this video. So for Zapier, I have a zap set up where every time I have a new email from Zillow, which if I click this, I've already set up my account. And I have this string, that every time there's an email from instant updates Zillow, and it has to deal with new or pending or something that's different about our property, then to automatically kick this whole zap off. So for example, this listing over here would kick it off, if I got it to my email. The next steps I do is I actually parse the email using Python. So rents 100 does require that you have an API key. But alongside that, you need to have the address or at least the location, latitude longitude coordinates of the property. So we want to do is to be able to get this address here is something that I did very similar in one of my courses, which if you want more detail, either message me for private coaching, or you could check out the course itself. So in this, I have some Python code, which basically gets that information that we want over here. And if we go to test action, I've already tested it, but you can see now we have key value pairs. So we have Street, the street from the email, the city, the list price, which is going to be really important for the 1% rule, and so on. Next, we go to rent ometer. And we're able to actually pass that information. So in that email, we got the street city state zip code, I passed that in, I passed in number of bedrooms, baths, also from that email. And in my case, my search is specific only for single family homes. So I know it's always going to be a house. So this gets done. So we have three steps. Now every time an email comes through, parse the email to get the information and go to rentometer API to get rental data. So we look at test action. We could see now that we have rental data mean median min and max.
04:55
Now it's really useful is Michael in the video how steps on calculating the 1% rule and comparing that to the sale price will because we get the sale price in the email. And with just a few lines of code, we could do this with just coding and not needing to have any manual metrics within the Excel file. Because that could always lead to errors and so on. So we go now to zap, we calculate the 1% rule, super simple. This is literally two lines of code here, just two lines of code, we get the median rent, then the list price, which the median rent comes from, rent ometer list price comes from the email, we take these inputs, we calculate the 1% rule, and then we calculate how different is the sale price or list price based against the 1% rule. So basically, would this pass or not. And here, you could see in this case, 1% rule would be 145,000, the properties listed at 300,000 Plus, so in this case, the 1% rule definitely does not pass it's point five 4%. And we want to be able to record this right. So we have a Google Sheets file, which is this here. And I'm going to do is just remove this row. So you can see this live actually happened when we test it. We have the columns and our Google Sheets. And we specified what we want each of those columns to be filled with, which has some information from the email itself, and then some information from pentameter. And then lastly, our automatic calculations of the 1% rule. So if we go to test action, we can I'm going to retest and review. So right now, Zapier is sending that information to Google Sheets. And if we look, the information is there, right. So amazing, because we don't have any formulas here. It's automatic, and it would happen every single time an email comes through. But we could always take it one step further, I only want to know if there's a good deal or not if it meets the 1% rule in this example, and I'm not going to check this Excel file every five minutes, but I still want to be alerted when it passes. So with Zapier, they have some really neat functionality where you can do an if else statement and only continue if it meets certain criteria. So I have here where anytime the sales price compared to what the 1% rule should be, if that percent is greater than zero, then that means it does pass rule, if not doesn't. So in this case, if it were to pass a rule, I would then send an email to myself, that would basically say, hey, the information did pass. So if we look at that here, we could see, you could set up the message any customer we want to which is really neat. And this case, I've passed information about the email, so the full address, the list price, and then that calculation of the 1% rule against the sales price. So this is a really, really awesome way for you to automate a process. I know I stepped through this a little bit more quickly, but I want you just to get the overview and power of using rent ometer coupled with Zapier to automate a lot of actions and talk to a lot of different applications, that this is something that you feel like you need additional help with and you'd like to hire out my services. Please check me out on Fiverr where me and my team could look into helping base on where what applications you use to bridge in rent ometer API, and possibly some other API's as well. Again, not an employee with Pentameter however, I am a passionate developer and trying to make things a lot easier for others. So if you like this kind of content, then please subscribe to this channel. Thanks