Rentify: helps landlords market, manage, and make more money from their properties

Rentify helps landlords market, manage, and make more money from their properties by using technology to make the process faster, cheaper, and hassle-free. Thousands of landlords join the platform each month to market and manage. Led by senior executives from Google, Samsung, and Zoopla, the business has grown to more than 200,000 transacted customers, 140,000 processed properties, and £156m of property under management cumulatively in London.

Rentify one of the UK’s prominent lettings platforms. Launched midway through 2012, the company helps landlords market, manage, and make more money from their properties by using technology to make the process faster, cheaper, and hassle-free. Thousands of landlords join the platform each month to market and manage their properties.

Rentify focuses on renting properties faster than conventional or online agents by marrying its vast proprietary pricing database, sophisticated technology, and real ‘boots on the ground’ service. By doing so it is able to access higher price points than online agents (charging 5.5% of an agreed tenancy + 2.5% management), but is disruptively priced below high street agents (e.g. Foxtons charge 20.4% to let and manage) at a fee structure they cannot replicate due to fixed costs and operational inefficiencies.

Led by senior executives from Google, Samsung, Panasonic, and Zoopla, the business has grown to more than 200,000 transacted customers around the UK, with 140,000 processed properties, and £156m of property under management cumulatively since 2012 in London.

The business uses technology and data to make the process of letting properties faster and hassle-free: whilst old fashioned estate agents rely on human knowledge, and the new breed of ‘online’ agents are purely based around arbitrage of portals like Rightmove and Zoopla, Rentify does everything from photography to viewings with people who are made more efficient by technology making decisions on pricing, prioritisation of enquiries, and more.

Rentify has raised close to £8m of investment from top tier investors including Balderton Capital (Lovefilm, Betfair, Crowdcube), and notable angel investors from Goldman Sachs, TPG Europe, and beyond.

Key facts

Bookable revenue in September (£) grew 3.3x YOY 2014 => 2015 Instruction value for November (£) over 10x YOY (instruction value defined by Rentify as total provisional contract value of new business leads, calculated based on average rent taken in London over the 3 months to November 2015 (source: HomeLet’s November 2015 Rental Index report) and the average length of a tenancy prevailing in October 2015 (source: Association of Residential Letting Agents’ October 2015 Private Rented Sector report). Grew property management base from £55m assets under management to £156m in the full year 2014 – 2015 Processing millions of pounds of rent each year 200,000 transacted customers to date. Featured on Radio 4, CNBC, Daily Mail, Telegraph, The Times, Guardian, and more

Rentify believes its technology platform is at least 1.5 – 2 years ahead of its nearest competitor.

Rentify is disrupting the £46bn lettings market in the UK. By 2020, over 20% of all dwellings in the UK will be privately rented, with a further 4m socially rented. The Private Rental Sector is worth over £400 billion in London alone, growing £50 billion in the last 12 months.

Whilst only 70% of the UK’s landlords use an estate agent to let or manage their property, the fee opportunity is £6bn. The further 30% of landlords who self-manage have a fee opportunity of £2.5bn.

By marrying speed of delivery and a lower price point, Rentify speaks to both self-managed and agency customers, meaning the audience for its services is significantly wider than either the traditional high street agent or an online-only service.

The rental market in the UK is a significant growth market with attractive CAGR. Whilst government is seeking to impose curbs on the attractiveness of buy to let properties, a recent Rentify poll of landlords showed that whilst many accidental landlords will be forced to change behaviour by changes to tax on mortgage interest, we believe they will simply be seeking a better deal than their high street agent can provide. Similarly, landlords who will be affected by the stamp duty change are more likely to aggressively close deals for multiple properties before the changes come into effect.

There is a significant amount of noise in the online agency space. Rentify is uniquely positioned to tackle it ahead of its competitors. Firstly, it has a large database of landlords in the UK, with more than 200,000 transacted customers on its books already. Secondly, Rentify has invested significantly in deep technologies to allow faster onboarding of landlords, properties, and tenants. Whilst typical high street agents can take days to onboard a landlord and property, Rentify takes minutes — the record for onboarding a landlord, property, and having tenants successfully place an offer is 24 hours — and can automatically generate paperwork without human intervention.

Crucially, the UK estate agency market is highly fragmented, with some 15,000 branches of high street agent vying over tiny patches of turf. Each is subscale, with high marketing costs, even higher fixed costs for rent and rates, no in-house technology, and a reliance on people and manual processes to deliver service to landlords. From our own calculation, the largest estate agent in London has just 5% market share, with a fixed cost of over £550,000 to open a new branch — which takes five to seven years to mature.

The Financials

Source: icnw