Turning from screening to platform-wide revenue

As a Staff Product Designer for RentSpree's Stay domain, I led growth-focused design across banking, payments, and financial reporting for landlords that were focused on building pathways to diversifying RentSpree’s revenue and growing platform adoption.

ROLE:

Staff Product Designer

Duration:

1 year

PROJECT:

Performance & Reporting

Employer:

RentSpree

Cheap to acquire, hard to diversify

RentSpree has grown almost entirely through tenant screening, developing and owning screening within MLS brokerages across the US. This gives RentSpree a low cost of customer acquisition and a great base of revenue, but as they sought to grow beyond screening, the growth and diversification of the revenue had not followed.

Payments had been introduced in the past two years, but adoption was stagnant, accounting for a fairly low percentage of our key customers, agent-assisted landlords. The read at the leadership level was that the gap came down to features — closing the distance between RentSpree and the DIY landlord tools that already had banking, transactions, and reporting built in.

The Performance view enables landlords to check income, occupancy, and expenses at a glance, then get deeper insights with a paid plan when they need more detail.

Property Performance page, basic view, showing property-level metrics available to all landlords — The basic view provides a cumulative, simplified read on rent collection, on-time payments, late payment history and a summary of expenses incurred.

Property Performance page, advanced view, showing deeper property metrics gated behind Landlord Pro — The advanced view, gated behind Landlord Pro, offers more of a detailed breakdown, while including base level investor insights they wouldn’t have insight into otherwise.

Resizing the vision for Performance

With feature parity identified as the path to growth, we started developing the Performance feature to give landlords insight into their property's performance and value, packaged as something worth paying for.

As I was aligned to the work, I learned the product manager who owned it was leaving. Digging into the scope they'd drafted, I found it wasn't just too large to deliver in time, it was built for an investor persona, with complex portfolio metrics our actual landlords didn't need. Most of our landlords have one to two properties. They're not investors, and in many cases were likely accidental landlords, inheriting a property or needing to find a renter after a personal shift.

With the product manager gone and engineering ready to build, I had less than two weeks to rescope and design. I dropped the insights that weren't possible or scoped and split the feature into two tiers instead: a basic view, undefined in the original scope, built to add real value for free, and an advanced view that went deeper for landlords who paid for it. It was a smaller, shippable bet on the landlord who was actually there, instead of a comprehensive one built for a landlord we didn't have.

Reports pulled directly from transaction data, the same data the banking integration produced.

Operating cash flow report broken into standard income and expense categories — The operating cash flow report, built around the categories other platforms treat as baseline.

Turning transactions into insight

With a shorter turnaround than Performance and no executive appetite to be tax-ready in the near term, I defined the first two reports to build as operating cash flow and income statement. Both connected directly to the advanced performance view, pulling from the same transaction data rather than asking landlords to enter anything by hand.

Staying informational, rather than building toward tax compliance, kept scope realistic for the timeline and avoided taking on tax logic and liability RentSpree didn't need to own for a landlord managing one or two properties. It also meant reporting could ship as a natural extension of Performance instead of a separate, heavier initiative.

Impact

The work is on the platform, and it's valuable, but it didn't move our key results metric.

What we found later through many failed attempts to drive growth is that we didn’t understand where the gap was till mid 2026. Agents and landlords still barely knew the platform beyond screening. The features would be valuable for landlords once we capitalized on the agent-landlord relationship, which is now in progress.

Accomplishments

Took over as informal product manager after the owning PM departed just before development, cutting an overscoped, power-user-oriented vision down to the everyday and asset-level views a landlord with one to four properties actually needed, and aligning that scope with executive leadership.
Scoped and designed operating cash flow and income reports built on transaction data, deliberately informational rather than tax-compliant.
Integrated Unit, a banking-as-a-service platform, giving landlords a business account separate from personal finances and producing the transaction data the reporting features depended on.

Reflection

RentSpree has built an efficient go-to-market: exclusive agreements with MLS brokerages kept screening volume climbing with almost no paid marketing or SEO spend. As a maturing startup, though, it hasn't found the next lever to accelerate revenue growth, which matters for raising capital or to eventually go public.

We knew agents and landlords didn't understand what the platform offered beyond screening, but not how deep that gap went. Had I known this at the start of my time, this would have led me to ask very different questions earlier and find the answers with my teammates. I'm proud of the work that we shipped to achieve feature parity and hope that the new focus on closing the gap between merely invited and easily converted helps RentSpree activate new, accelerated growth.