Haven

Photographs on a property

Every property has a grid of pictures. Choose up to twenty at a time, drag them into the order you want, and give any of them a caption. JPEG, PNG, HEIC and WebP all work, so you can send pictures straight off a phone without converting them first.

A cover picture, shown on the properties list

One picture is the cover, and it is the one that appears beside the property in your list of properties, so a page of addresses becomes a page of buildings. The first picture you add becomes the cover on its own -- if you only ever upload one, there is nothing else to do. Pick a different one at any time, and if you delete the cover the next picture takes its place rather than leaving the row blank.

File a picture against one unit

A photograph of Unit B's kitchen belongs to the building but is about the unit, so each picture can name the unit it shows. The grid labels them, which is what makes a fourplex's pictures readable instead of being forty tiles in a row.

Pictures you keep to your office

Damage, a turnover, a roof before it was replaced -- not every photograph is one you would hand out. Any picture can be marked as your office's own, and the grid tags it so you can see at a glance which ones those are.

Phone photographs are resized, and their location is removed

A picture taken on a phone is far larger than any screen needs and carries the exact spot it was taken at, written in by the camera. Haven resizes each one as it arrives -- a typical phone photograph ends up about a tenth of the size, so pages stay quick -- and removes the location before storing it. Pictures that came out sideways are turned the right way up at the same time.

What a property is worth today, from what you paid for it

Tell Haven what a property cost and the year you bought it, and the property page works out what it is worth now. It uses the house price index the Federal Housing Finance Agency publishes for your ZIP code, built from tens of millions of home sales, and it costs nothing -- there is no service to sign up for and nothing to switch on.

The page shows the whole calculation: what you paid, the index for your area the year you bought, the index now, and the division. You can put that in front of an owner and answer the question "where does this number come from", which is not something a figure out of a black box lets you do. It is an estimate of what the market has done around the property, not an appraisal, and it knows nothing about the building itself -- a new roof or a gutted kitchen is not in it. The page says all of that under the figure.

It goes down as well as up

A property bought when prices in its area were at their highest will show a number below what was paid, because that is what happened. The figures are the published ones and they are not shaded in either direction. Where the index does not reach a particular ZIP code -- it covers about nineteen thousand of them -- Haven falls back to the state figure and says on the page that it is a wider area than your property.

What each unit collects against what it would rent for

A new panel on the property page puts the two figures side by side, unit by unit and for the building as a whole, and tells you what the difference comes to over a year as a dollar figure rather than as a percentage. An empty unit is counted as empty rather than as income, and a unit there is no figure for is listed as one we cannot price -- which is a different thing from one that is already at the going rate.

What the Census Bureau and HUD say about the area

A small panel on the property page shows the median home value and the median rent by bedroom count for the ZIP code, from the American Community Survey, alongside HUD's Fair Market Rents for the same area. Both come free from the federal government. They are area-wide figures shown for information and research -- nothing in Haven is priced from them, and the panel says so.

Every figure says where it came from

Each row names the source of the figure it was measured against -- leases you have signed elsewhere for the same sort of unit, or the asking rent recorded on the unit itself -- and the leases behind it are listed in full underneath. A number you cannot see the workings of is a number you cannot take to an owner.

Sign out from any page

The button sits at the bottom of the menu, beside your name, and turns red when you point at it. It signs you out of Haven and of the Axion sign-in page together, so you land on a sign-in screen instead of being let straight back in -- which is what you want on an office computer that someone else uses next.

Your name and your role at the bottom of the menu

The corner under the menu used to repeat your company's name, which is already at the top. It now shows who is signed in and in what role -- owner, manager, maintenance -- so a shared screen tells you whose session it is before anything gets changed. A long name is shortened rather than crowding out the Sign out button.

The bottom of the menu no longer scrolls out of sight

On a shorter laptop screen the whole menu scrolled as one piece, so your name sat below the fold until you scrolled to the end of the list. Now only the list of pages scrolls, and your name and Sign out stay pinned at the bottom.