RentBetter's Newest Partnership with Mortgage Broker Community - Finance and Coffee
An interview with RentBetter CEO and Australia's largest mortgage broker community, Finance and Coffee.
An interview with RentBetter CEO, Jeremy Goldschmidt and Australia's Largest Mortgage Broker Community - Finance and Coffee.
See how RentBetter's latest partnership with Mortgage Broker community, Finance and Coffee is helping landlords across Australia.
Recently, Jeremy sat down with their team to talk all about the RentBetter platform, how the self-managing model is kicking off within the industry, and how RentBetter can bring you all tools you need to succeed as a DIY landlord.
Let’s start with the origin story. How did RentBetter come about?
The RentBetter business really came about after I bought my first property in my mid to late 20s, got my keys and met with a property manager. Then, I thought “I’m not sure I trust this person to look after my property. I am going to try and do it myself”. So through a bit of research, I figured out what was required, went ahead and did it.
Over time, a lot of family or friends, even friends of friends, have come to me and asked: “You self manage your property, how do you do it?” And it just became very obvious that there were a lot of people who were looking to go and manage it themselves and that there was quite a bit of demand for this sort of service. But no one really had a tool or a method for doing it that was consistent, professional and scalable.
The second was, from my years of experience as a management consultant at one of the banks, I looked at how financial advisors across the country operate. They have the support of sophisticated technology systems behind them which help them with their back-office operations and give them the level of efficiency they need to scale. And then I came back to my property and asked “Is there a scalable system like this for landlords?
No. Well, maybe we should create one!”. So that was the starting point for the RentBetter business.
We started building out the platform and it’s been in its current form for about two and a half years. The first six months were really about just testing and learning to see how it would go in the market and who would be interested in it. In the last few years, we've really started to see the numbers grow.
Tell us a bit more about RentBetter’s philosophy
There are a couple of different principles that sit behind the business. The first and most obvious one is that no one cares about your investment or your assets as much as you do. The typical issue people find with hiring an agent is that they’re not going to act upon inquiries and other information from tenants anywhere near as fast as a landlord will because, you know, they've got several hundreds of them.
And tenants are just like a customer – somebody who will pay you for a product or a service. If you treat them with respect they'll continue to pay. I see a lot of instances where people might feel that the person in between who's trying to manage this relationship doesn't treat them as a customer. They treat them very poorly. And I believe going to the landlords directly will resolve some of that.
The second part is transparency and information in real-time which gives you the ability to act on it quickly and make a decision that's better for you, as opposed to the traditional agent model in which landlords don't have the power to see what’s going on.
The third and final thing is that property management is NOT rocket science. It's heavily process-driven. And if you have the right tools and the right mechanisms to deal with things, then it doesn’t have to be a burden. It's something that you can certainly do. Especially when it comes to long term rentals with compliance and legislation involved, the right technology will add that extra layer of protection for everybody.
What’s the process for self-managing a rental property?
There are two main parts to what we do. The first is to find a tenant and the second is to manage a property.
Using the platform you can advertise your property on the major property sites like realestate.com.au, domain.com.au and rent.com.au, handle enquiries as well as online applications, and then with one click you can run a tenant check through Equifax, and with another click, you can create a lease agreement which both you and your tenant can sign electronically through the platform. You can also create condition reports for you and your tenants to sign.
Once you and your tenants have agreed to the terms of the lease, your tenants can select their preferred payment method (credit card or via a bank account) and the system will automatically create a payment schedule, track and receipt payments as they come through. Should anything go wrong with the payment, there are alerts and notifications for both you and your tenant, so you'll always know what's happening.
This gives our customers a lot of peace of mind because they don’t have to chase the tenant or be the bad guy, but the system is actually doing the heavy lifting for them.
When it comes to some of the more administrative parts of managing your property, the platform also has you covered. You can send bills to your tenant to pay, and they can upload any maintenance tasks or repairs required. All of your rental income and expenses are then captured in a report which is always up to date and can be sent off to your accountant at tax time.
It can really be done in a very quick timeframe with a few clicks on the platform. And that's something our customers absolutely love. Our platform basically solves all of this for about $1 a day.
What about inspections?
At the moment, the landlord does actually do it themselves. Somebody has got to open the door and hand over the keys. We're about to partner with a third party, where that third party will actually be able to be booked to do an inspection. But pretty much everything else can be handled online.
What does it mean for RentBetter to partner with mortgage brokers?
I think it's really a powerful thing. So what we've traditionally seen in our business is that a lot of retirees or early retirees use RentBetter. They're the people who tend to own the properties and in our experience, they're the ones who've had enough of a real estate agent not solving their problems or being a point of friction for them. So they're happy to take it on.
But what we've really seen over the last year, in particular, is a younger segment of customers in their late 30s and 40s who are considering buying their first or second investment property. So the natural thing for us is to partner with who’s talking to those people at the time they are thinking about purchasing their investment property.
From our perspective, mortgage brokers are the first touchpoint for the clients. We think a product that's interesting to their customers should be interesting to them. They're in a position to, I guess, do something good for their customers and have them know exactly which property manager they should consider and that’s using the RentBetter platform. As a thank you for the referral, we offer brokers a commission. It’s a win-win.
Where to from here?
There's a few really exciting things that we're doing at the moment. One is, again, partnerships like this one, with people who are working with customers who have properties or who are looking to buy a property. So it's just expanding the number of customers that we access.
In terms of the features that we offer, we're getting ready to launch another partnership with an inspection group, who will be able to offer their services through the platform. So that means if our platform users need to do routine inspections throughout the lease, that will be handled.
As a landlord, I stay in full control, but I'm able to get certain jobs that I need done to my property through the platform without having to commit to someone charging me 7% or 9% a year to manage the property.
