BUSINESS OPORTUNITY

RESIDENTIAL PROPERTY RENTAL LANDSCAPE 2015

Before 2015, people looking for apartments to rent in Germany had to pay the real estate agent a fee and commission when renting a residential property. On the 1st of June of 2015, a new law entered into effect, stating that the fee and commission had to be paid by the person hiring the service, either the tenant or the landlord.

For real estate agents, the new law presented a challenge: persuading property owners that they could provide a better quality service than if the landlords would try renting the apartments themselves.

As soon as the new law was announced, it was clear that a market opportunity was created for those who could capitalize on it. The first questions were evident: What can be done to help landlords take the search for tenants into their own hands? Would they pay for such a solution?

LEAN VALIDATION 

VALIDATED BUSINESS HYPOTHESIS

• Many private landlords will attempt to rent their apartments themselves in order to save the costs of a real estate agent
• Rental offerings are exposed to a large audience online (portals and social media) without any filtering
• Property owners are not equipped to efficiently take all prospects into consideration in order to identify the best-suited candidates
• Property owners don’t enough bang for their buck when advertising in real estate portals

SOLUTION

A cloud-Saas that facilitates fast and efficient screening, through the use of a ranking/recommendation system. The system would recommend to the landlord the best potential tenants to rent an object based on their score. The score is acquired by the potential tenants depending on the amount of personal information (financial, recommendations, bank statements…) that the potential tenant is willing to disclose. Typically a score would be based on values ranging from 0 to 10.

BUSINESS DESIGN

BUSINESS MODEL

• Monthly subscription fees for access to full feature Saas platform version
• One-time-fee to landlords per ad/posting
• Bulk sales advertising discounts (partly shared with customers)
• Added services through upselling (i.e. real estate agent services, legal services, repair services, moving companies, painters, plumbers etc.)

TEAM

PRODUCT