Rentberry, a tech company founded in 2015, is the result of a frustrating apartment hunting experience in San Francisco. CEO, Alex Lubinsky, spent over a month searching the San Francisco rental market when he realized there must be a more efficient way to find the right apartment. He later found that blockchain technology could be the solution to the woes of apartment hunting. Blockchain technology is weaving its way into many major industries. The archaic rental market is prime territory for this new-age technology to make its mark.
Established in 2015, Rentberry set out to restructure the rental market. By 2017, Alex and his team were working on using blockchain technology to further improve their platform. Rentberry’s goal is to simplify the long-term rental process by automating traditionally clunky procedures using smart contracts. This benefits both the tenant and landlord, and saves everyone involved time and money.
Rentberry uses blockchain technology as the foundation of its user-friendly platform. The Rentberry platform is used to search, negotiate and rent apartments. It also has features that are useful after the initial rental agreement is signed, such as allowing tenants to communicate with their landlord via an online messaging system, as well as pay rent and submit maintenance requests.
Additionally, Rentberry uses blockchain technology’s immutable ledger to calculate a score for each landlord and tenant that is a culmination of past behaviors on the platform, including paying rent on time, reasonable response times to messages, and swiftness to addressing maintenance requests, along with publicly available data such as credit reports and background checks.
While it may sound surprising, Rentberry discovered that landlords rather choose a tenant who has a better rental history, but is willing to pay less, over a tenant with a negative rental history that offers a higher rate. This might not apply to cities with hot rental markets or impossibly high average incomes. But, in cold markets when a landlord needs to secure a tenant, it might just come into play.
Long-term renting can be a hassle; between the paperwork, open houses and tracking down landlords to submit maintenance requests. The rental market hasn’t quite caught up to the tech boom other industries are experiencing. Rental alternatives making their way into the market have the ability to enhance the renter’s experience.
Rentberry is offering an alternative to the previously outdated rental market. Using blockchain, they offer both tenants and landlords a new, trouble-free and transparent way to rent apartments.
