How to Tell if Tenants Are Getting Rowdy? One Landlord Found a Solution.

Dave Krauss had a successful Airbnb rental business until one weekend in 2014. A renter supposedly looking for a quiet break with her boyfriend ended up having a two-day “mini-Coachella style rager” at Mr. Krauss’s condo, he says.

It wasn’t until two days after she checked out that he discovered what had happened. Fourteen angry neighbors had filed noise complaints, and a cease-and-desist letter forced him to sell the investment property at a $30,000 loss.

“It had sullied my reputation. I slept fine that weekend. My neighbors didn’t,” he says.

Mr. Krauss vowed to never let it happen again. If he could get a simple notification when a disturbance started, rather than be the last to find out, he could head off potential problems.

Then, early in 2015, he met Andrew Schulz, an electrical engineer, who was teaching a class on building custom smart-home technology at the Dallas Entrepreneur Center. Mr. Krauss told him he didn’t want to be his student but would like to hire him to solve his problem. They went to lunch and discussed the design criteria for a system that would ultimately become what the company calls a “smoke detector for noise.”

“We still have the back-of-the-napkin sketches to this day,” says Mr. Krauss.

Here’s how the technology works: Sensors are secured to wall outlets in areas where renters are likely to create noise, most often the living room. The gadgets capture data on sound volume that is turned into a noise score accessible by the property manager from anywhere.

To see if there was a need for such an invention, Mr. Krauss attended a conference for professional vacation rental managers in the fall of 2015. When he told one attendee about his NoiseAware tool, she told him of having to deal with neighbors filing complaints weekend after weekend against renters who would get loud when drinking wine outdoors.

“We never looked back,” says Mr. Krauss.

NoiseAware customers are given options to set an appropriate risk threshold for their property. If the threshold is breached, they are notified immediately via text so that they can prevent potential noise issues.

In 2016, NoiseAware says, the company raised $1 million in a round of angel financing from a group that included former HomeAway Chief Operating Officer Tom Hale. The company says it is currently closing a new round of financing. It won’t disclose specific revenue but says that sales last year were eight times the 2016 figure, and its product protects more than 3,000 properties.

Source: wsj.com