Ever tried to find an apartment? It’s not a fun process. One RingCentral customer, Apartment Hunters, helps make the apartment-discovery process a little less painful – for people in its central Florida operating area, at least.
The firm’s service is completely free to use. (Its revenue comes from the apartment communities with which it collaborates.) Apartment Hunters offers an apartment-search portal on its website, and it has retail locations in Tampa, Orlando and Gainesville.
Agents are also available to meet with clients at their homes or workplaces. Between site visits and its own storefronts, Apartment Hunters aims to offer personalized, one-on-one service.
But the company’s distributed-workforce model poses some challenges. Chief among them, Apartment Hunters IT supervisor Alex Iliff told us, is logistics. The leasing process involves a lot of paperwork between lessees, lessors and brokers – and that means a lot of faxes being exchanged. In addition, the different parties involved in apartment searches wind up calling each other often.
For most of its existence, Apartment Hunters simply didn’t have the ability to stitch its workforce together under a single, simple phone system. By the end of 2012, Alex and his coworkers were fed up with the phone setup they had. They began looking at alternatives, and the choice shortly became clear.
Apartment Hunters wound up opting for a RingCentral cloud phone system. The simplicity that RingCentral presents was one huge selling point, Alex noted. The very low cost of service (compared to legacy phone systems) was another. And the feature set that RingCentral offers presented a third.
Apartment Hunters HQ
“We now have the ability to send and receive text messages at our business numbers,” Alex said. “Plus, we can fax from our computers. We wind up sending a lot of correspondence that way because it’s so easy.”
Online fax is particularly valuable for Apartment Hunters’ roster of remote agents. With the old phone arrangement, Alex said, they “would have to go into the office to send and receive faxes. Now they don’t.”
The fact that RingCentral is reliable is just icing on the cake, Alex added. “The price that we’re getting is phenomenal, and the extras just keep adding up,” he said. “We’re so happy we made the switch.”
Originally published Apr 08, 2013, updated Aug 22, 2021
