Blog mania BTC: ICO Spotlight | Rentberry – The One-Stop Shop, Open, And Transparent Rental Platform

Regardless of what side you have experienced (landlord or tenant) you probably know that the rental process - to put it nicely - can be improved. To be more blunt, it’s archaic, time-consuming, costly, and non-transparent. Even worse, the process is a little different depending on the landlord.

Having experienced working in the rental market first-hand, in 2015 Rentberry’s founders decided to create a web-based long-term rental platform.

This isn't a business that needs to get off the ground. The Rentberry platform is currently operational. Here are the key highlights/facts from their business:

$4 million USD raised;
224,000+ listed properties;
In 4,948 cities;
23 member team;
53% month on month active user traffic growth during Q3 2017
San Francisco-based Hqs
4,000+ applications processed

With the advent of blockchain, Rentberry’s goal is to leverage the technology to ensure a seamless rental experience which will allow the entire rental application and rental contracts process to be completed quickly and online.

As a result, blockchain adoption will allow Rentberry to focus on the fixing the following key rental problem areas:

Eliminate the need for agent/broker model (and associated expenses) by allowing landlords and tenants to compete all rental tasks online in a peer to peer manner;
Establish a uniform international standard of rental procedures that will benefit expats and migrants living and working in new countries; and
Provide a crowdsourced security deposit network that will allow tenants to reduce the amount of their own money they need tie up in their rental security deposits.

In doing so, Rentberry may one day be the first international company to operate in the long-term residential real estate space to ensure a fair, frictionless, and seamless process for all involved parties.

RENTAL TASK LIST SUMMARY

Rentberry’s rental platform will allow users to engage in the following rental activities and tasks:

Searching for properties;
Making offer/bids via the Rentberry auctioning platform;
Screening prospects;
Selecting the best/most suitable candidates (see image below);

Negotiating the terms;
Unlocking rental security deposits;
E-signing contracts;
Paying rent;
Paying utilities (depending on Rentberry partnerships)
Submitting maintenance requests;
Hiring third-party service providers (e.g. handymen and plumbers); and
Enabling landlords to stay connected with tenants.

ICO DISTRIBUTION DETAILS

TOKEN NAME	BERRY
TOKEN TYPE	Ethereum ERC-20
ICO PERIOD	DEC 5th 2017 – FEB 28th 2018
TOTAL SUPPLY	11,500,000
TOKEN RATE	1 ETH = 2,500 BERRY
MINIMUM CONTRIBUTION	0.1 ETH
ACCEPTED CURRENCIES	ETH, BTC

ICO PHASE	% BONUS AWARD	BASE EXCHANGE RATE
DEC 5th – DEC 19th	33%	1 ETH = 2,500 BERRY
DEC 20th – DEC 26th	27%	1 ETH = 2,500 BERRY
DEC 27th – JAN 16th	20%	1 ETH = 2,500 BERRY
JAN 17th – JAN 30th	13%	1 ETH = 2,500 BERRY
JANE 31th – FEB 13th	7%	1 ETH = 2,500 BERRY

ICO PROCEED ALLOCATION

AREA	PERCENT
IT Development	30%
Marketing and Sales	20%
Acquisitions and Partnerships	15%
International Expansion	12.5%
Admin and Operations	10%
Development Fund	5%
Legal	5%
Bug Bounty Program	2.5%

ROADMAP

KEY PARTNERSHIPS

FINAL THOUGHTS

Without blockchain Rentberry has a great model. With blockchain, Rentberry’s platform is poised to be a rental-market sector game changer.

The benefit that sticks out here the most is the capability to pay rent using BERRY tokens. This capability will carry risks for both sides as the price of BERRY tokens will fluctuate as a tradable coin. However, there are mechanisms that Rentberry can deploy (such as staking) that can encourage BERRY owners to hodl their token and help stabilize the price. Rentberry will have to see how much platform members are using that capability from user data, and decide if and how, operations/rules need tweaking.

Regardless, paying with BERRY will allow anyone in the world that has crypto holdings to easy exchange for BERRY and pay rent. Today you can set up an automatic withdrawal from a tenant’s bank account, but if something goes wrong for a tenant one month it’s not that easy to liquidate investments quickly and get rent in on time. Assuming a tenant has crypto holdings, procuring needed BERRY tokens by selling other tokens will be very quick and easy. Hopefully easier than it is today.

If you are like me, you believe that much of the future economy will be run on cryptocurrencies. As mainstream population and corporations adopt cryptocurrencies, I imagine people will have holdings where they can easily draw from to use for just about any needs for survival – including rent – and probably mortgage payments.

Rentberry’s other cool idea is the ability of crowdsourcing security deposit coverage. Members of the platform will have the opportunity to cover portions of tenant’s security deposit and get financial rewards in return. In other words, Rentberry will sort of act like a bank. How will members decide risk? Rentberry has a propriety scoring algorithm that draws from different sources such as:

Information from applications;
Previous payment performance;
History of evictions;
Bankruptcy records;
Data and scores from credit bureaus;
Past due accounts; and
Publicly available information.

Tenants will also be scored (see illustration below):

rentberry proprietary scoring system.PNG

To conclude, Rentberry has an experienced team, an operational and growing platform, and a product and service that is applicable to just about everyone at some point in their lives.

If I convinced you that Rentberry derserves your attention and consideration, please read their whitepaper. They go into depth while I only skimmed the surface.

Their ICO is currently live.