RentSpree is a sharp value-add for rental businesses but will need to outsmart the long-existing habits of established landlords and leasing agents. In short, it’s targeting an industry that doesn’t break things that don’t need fixing.
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RentSpree is the modern rental agent’s day-to-day resource for tenant attraction, application management, screening and listing marketing.
Platforms: Browser, mobile responsive
Ideal for: Leasing agents and property managers
Top selling points:
- Easy integration with existing software
- Agent Tools suite
- Co-branding landing pages
- LeaseLink for marketing applications
- Applicant “resume”
- Streamlined, minimized rental apps
Top concern:
RentSpree is a sharp value-add for rental businesses but will need to outsmart the long-existing habits of established landlords and leasing agents. In short, it’s targeting an industry that doesn’t break things that don’t need fixing.
This article was updated on April 26, 2022.
What you should know
RentSpree is software to help landlords manage the business of occupancy. It provides rapid and deep tenant screening (with an API), application processing, a vendor marketplace for things such as renters’ insurance and a suite of tools for agents to track applicants for future business, promote themselves and their successes and brand rental listings. RentSpree is not relegated to large institutional landlords, meaning it scales well to accommodate the needs of owner-operators.
RentSpree is API-first, meaning its intent is to become part of something else. This is a smart business strategy, and one way it can overcome my one concern, is that it has to overcome the countless existing systems for analyzing the tenancy value of rental applicants.
This is niche software not by category, but by function.
Application completion, submission and tenant screening processes are must-haves for any rental business, but most solutions for handling it are cobbled together from manual processes and disparate background-checking services not tailored to real estate.
RentSpree’s founders noticed that leak in the workflow stream and built something to not just patch it, but to augment the entire leasing process.
Currently in use by more than 90 associations and brokerages, including BrightMLS, CAR, New Jersey Realtors, CRMLS and the California Apartment Association as well as large renting portal Rentals.com and Lone Wolf‘s Transactions (with Ziplogix), RentSpree is already well-entrenched in the industry, which is impressive given its 2017 founding date.
Naturally, those industry relationships provide RentSpree with terrific access to agents who work in the rental market, for which it offers a collection of tools for them to expand relationships and foment future business by leveraging the tenant data already in its ecosystem.
The Rental Client Manager, or RCM, pulls in contacts from application and tenancy data to offer agent-users accurate, ready-to-go lead lists. There’s all kinds of value in not having to re-input data, from time spent to forgotten data points, but what’s most critical is that the relationship already exists, giving users an advantageous upper hand.
To avoid redundancy with an existing contact manager or CRM, RentSpree allows for easy .CSV imports. However, make sure what RentSpree is offering here is worth switching from what you’re currently invested in. It very well could be, but don’t spend the same money twice.
Agent Profiles are also part of the agent feature suite, providing a space to produce performance resumes, for lack of a better term. They can augment search results on your behalf, give potential leads a source of credibility and another outlet for sharing listings connected to your record.
And speaking of, the Listings component of RentSpree provides a web outlet to promote properties and pull in more applications. The application’s screening tools can be accessed directly from listing pages, too.
Don’t let the breadth of these tools overwhelm you, as enterprise accounts are not RentSpree’s only customer base; it also works well for small landlords and the occasional residential agent handling management duties for a few clients.
Through whatever larger system, RentSpree requires a single sign-on, meaning your existing organization login is all you’ll need to gain access to its screening and lease application features.
Prior to filling out an app, property managers are privy to an applicant’s resume and initial screening, a one-sheet that offers a colorful, informative look into the person requesting to apply. There’s an applicant score, all necessary contact information and even the chance to verify if the person is represented by an agent.
If it looks good, RentSpree can deliver an email invitation to apply.
Rental applications are visually minimized and user-centric; they won’t burden the applicant with clinical layouts or tiny text boxes that aren’t big enough for the data required or in any way agonizing to complete. And the cool part is that RentSpree’s forms are just data-clones for your association or state’s required forms, meaning that the data input automatically populates that standard form upon submission.
Accepting or denying a tenant is a one-click process, and any denials that occur generate a compliant denial letter. An individual can be “accepted on condition,” too, and that agreement is as clear and concise as other aspects of the software.
RentSpree has added a renters’ insurance marketplace and also offers a-la-carte rent estimate reports that provides in-depth looks into your market’s property types and details and geographically-proximal comparables.
The product’s built-in scaling is impressive, it can work for any size user out of the box, and then ebb and flow as they do.
Rent-tech is only going to become more critical moving forward. Homeownership is moving farther away for more people, making renting a longer-term option as inventories get squeezed and prices inflate.
Have a technology product you would like to discuss? Email Craig Rowe
Craig C. Rowe started in commercial real estate at the dawn of the dot-com boom, helping an array of commercial real estate companies fortify their online presence and analyze internal software decisions. He now helps agents with technology decisions and marketing through reviewing software and tech for Inman.
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