You know that clip of Steve Carell from The Office where he’s shouting “No, God! No, God, please no! No! No! Nooooooooo!” That’s how I feel about Amazon’s announcement that it’s adding a new service to Alexa for landlords. It’s called Alexa for Residential that, according to Amazon, “makes it...

The surveillance + landlord thing is triggering me

  • abc [he/him, comrade/them]
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    4 years ago

    Amazon’s endgoal will be to become a middleman for landlord management services. Everything currently run by private landlords operating through local and regional real estate agencies or property management agencies will become run by Amazon.

    Yeah I'd probably bet money on them coming out with some all-in-one web platform for landlords to use for charging rent, maintenance requests, etc. Buy out AppFolio and RealPage (I struggle to think of any other property management software that has a sizeable share of the market) and just rebrand as Amazon Properties or something. Prime users get 3% off their monthly rent!!

    • Awoo [she/her]
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      4 years ago

      Exactly what concerns me. It's a messy market that is fully of small private local businesses that is ripe for a tech "disruptive product" to lay waste to it all and turn it all into 1-3 mega companies. That's the formula for recognising markets where these kinds of disruptive products can work.