Rentberry— Evolution of the Rental Marketplace
website : https://rentberry.cryptonomos.com/
What is Rentberry?
Rentberry is a decentralized home rental platform with the tools for landlords and tenants to complete all the tasks necessary for renting a property.
That includes :
- The application process
- A rental auction process where people can bid for a rental property
- Signing the rental agreement
- Organizing rent payments
- Setting up utility bills
- Paying the deposit using crowdsourcing (more on that below)
So quite a comprehensive system there and it will allow people to organize a rental without the need for a real estate agent.
That will be great news for people who are fed up with paying exorbitant fees from agents who don’t do seem to do very much.
Encouragingly, Rentberry already has an established customer base with 120,000 users, 224,000 properties on their books and over 4,000 applications processed. Their user base grew by over 53% in the third quarter of 2017 alone.
Nearly half a trillion dollars in the world are tied up in rental security deposits. That’s a lot of cash.
Rentberry’s bidding platform for tenants and landlords.
Engineers at Rentberry, according to CEO Alex Lubinsky, are working to build out functionalities leveraging blockchain technology to create a platform where users can ask community members to help front their rental security deposits — freeing up some of those dollars for precisely the people who most need to access them.
In exchange, community members who help cover the renter security deposit will receive a return of a set interest rate to be paid back by the renter over time. The interest can be seen, in essence, as a charge of three to five percent fee on their ability to access that $500 or $1,400 that would otherwise be tied up in a rental security deposit. Lubinsky pointed out that you won’t find that kind of rate with any credit card.
“On average, we feel it will be around five percent,” Lubinsky said. “To give you an example, 1,000 bucks or like 2,000 dollars, you would pay $9 per month, or like $8 per month, which is very small. So you can unfreeze $2,000 for $8 per month. Who else can give you this kind of deal?”
Secondary to helping free up money for renters, Lubinsky said he thinks this is a good opportunity for people wary of exposing their savings to the volatility of the stock market. While the return on the investment won’t be as great as the traditional stock market, the return on this community backing program will be much greater than the return on an average savings account.
The fee will work on a sliding scale for renters, Lubinsky explained — renters with healthier credit histories will receive lower interest rates than others. And, the community bakers willing to take on the riskier renters will receive the best interest rates as a reward.
Currently, Rentberry has over 100,000 users and 200,000 rental properties registered in the U.K. and the U.S. Rentberry just closed a seed round funding of $4 million with investments from venture capital and angel investors, including 808 Ventures, Zing Capital, Beechwood Ventures, and Chinese VC fund Jade Value. The San Francisco-based startup also recently announced an ICO, which Lubinsky said is intended to help support international expansion.
While the platform has primarily served as a place for landlords to effectively vet tenants bidding for the rental application, Lubinsky said functionality is also being developed to include — to the benefit of renters — landlord reviews, too.
Lubinsky hopes to launch the new functionalities in 2018, as well as expand the platform to Australia, Canada, and the UK.
The ICO
Rentberry’s ICO is going on at the moment and will end on 28th February or earlier if the hard cap of $30 million is reached.
They already raised $4 million in a pre-sale and have a range of institutional investors in the project which is a good sign.
The token name for Rentberry’s token is the BERRY and for the ICO it is priced at 1 ETH = 2500 BERRY, which at the time of writing is equivalent to about $0.44 per token.
The minimum purchase is 0.1 Ethereum or 250 BERRY.
In terms of the distribution of tokens, 70% will be distributed to the community, 20% will go to the company reserves and 10% to the team. All unsold tokens will be burned.
Token Purpose
The tokens will have a number of usages on the platform. All of the payments on Rentberry’s platform will be made using BERRY tokens. Landlords will even be able to collect rent in BERRY tokens.
They could then use those tokens to pay for things like advertising their property on the platform or for services such as cleaning and maintenance.
Tenants will be required to pay 1000 BERRY tokens for each application to give landlords access to all the information on them available via the blockchain.
If their application is successful, 950 of the tokens will go to the landlord towards the first month’s rent and 50 will be retained by Rentberry as a fee for their services. If the application is unsuccessful, the 1000 tokens will be returned to the tenant.
Companies will have to pay 150 BERRY tokens to manage more than three properties on the platform.
Security Deposits
One of the most innovative features of the Rentberry platform is that it will allow people to have their security deposits crowdfunded.
At the moment, over $500 billion annually is locked up in security deposits on properties around the world and this money could be much more usefully funded and used by a wider community.
At the same time, large security deposits can be restricting for some people and prevent them from being able to rent properties.
So Rentberry will allow people to pay for security deposits using a crowdfunding model. How this will work is that instead of having to put up the full deposit in advance, tenants can ask for other people on the Rentberry platform to help crowdfund their deposit.
Then the tenant will pay these people back gradually for the amount that was crowdfunded, plus interest. The interest rate will be bid for but is expected to be around 5% in most cases.
Conclusion — An Industry Ripe for Disruption
There is little doubt that the rental industry is ripe for disruption.
Anyone who has been involved in renting a property — either as a landlord or a tenant — will have experienced the high costs and significant amount of hassle that is normally involved.
The sector is crying out for someone to come along and cut out the middleman and allow everything to be done online at a fraction of the cost and without a lot of the hassle.
So Rentberry are offering a solution to this by designing a platform that will allow the whole process to be dealt with online using blockchain technology.
Plus they will offer the ability for security deposits to be crowdfunded and paid off over time, which should be very attractive to tenants.
Overall then this looks like a great idea and if Rentberry are able to execute their plans successfully and get widespread take-up of the platform, they could well become the “Uber of Renting” and cause a major disruption of the rental industry.
TEAM
You can check out their ICO here, which ends on 28th February.
FOR MORE INFO ABOUT RENTBERRY :
Website : https://rentberry.cryptonomos.com/
Whitepapper : https://rentberry.cryptonomos.com/downloads/Rentberry_Whitepaper_en.pdf
Twitter : https://twitter.com/Rentberry_
Author : Liana Kurniawan
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