This is a short field guide, not full documentation. Yardi’s official docs exist; they are also correct; they are also, in a handful of places, not quite the whole story. Here’s what we wish we’d known before our first RentCafe integration.
Auth is stickier than it looks
The API key scopes are property-level, not portfolio-level. If you’re building a multi-tenant site, you want to plan for a credential-per-property pattern from day one — retrofitting it later is unpleasant.
Pagination has opinions
The default page size is small, and the cursor is stateful on the server side. If you parallelize naively, you’ll get duplicates and silent gaps. Fetch serially, or fetch by unit-id range.
The three endpoints that’ll eat your day
Availability, floorplans, and a surprisingly quiet endpoint called “market rent” – which returns different data depending on whether the property is participating in revenue management. We’ve written about this one at length internally; the short version is: always cross-check against the lease-activity feed before surfacing a number on the public site.
We’ll write a longer post if there’s interest. Until then – good luck, and feel free to email if you’re stuck.