What is Rentberry?
Rentberry is a
new-to-blockchain rental housing platform. Rentberry is not a typical
blockchain start-up, in that they already have an established platform and
users (tenants and landlords). They are relatively new however, only going live
early 2017, and the blockchain leveraged upgrade of their platform has yet to
be implemented. Their business currently caters to cities in the U.S.A.
The purpose of
Rentberry’s Initial Token Sale (ITS), and conversion to blockchain is to (1)
raise capital to expand internationally, and (2) reduce inefficiencies,
inconveniences, and insecurities present in the rental housing market today.
Rentberry’s use case is
that although the number of renters has substantially increased, with the
average person renting until 40 years of age, there remains a number of
problems in the current rental housing ecosystem. These include: (1) tedious
rental applications, (2) frequent bidding wars with other prospective tenants
without transparency on the current bid, (3), uncomfortable face-to-face
negotiations, and (4) frozen security deposit assets regardless of tenant’s
credentials and track record, to name a few.
Rentberry claims to
make this process less costly, more convenient, secure, and transparent.
Less costly: Agents
and brokers sometimes charge additional fees for minimal services, and
landlords for tenants to freeze thousands in rental security deposits.
Rentberry will eliminate the need for agents and brokers by allowing peer to
peer rental negotiations, agreements, and executions. Rentberry will also
provide a crowdsourced security deposit network which will effectively unfreeze
security deposits to generate interest.
Convenient: Many
practices still involve posting listings or classified ads in local newspapers.
Websites are available such as Craiglist, Zillow, Rightmove, Zoopla, but
provide limited information on properties, and no support for contracts rent
collection, maintenance requests etc. Rentberry will provide a platform with
all services in one place, including screening prospective tenants,
negotiating, e-signing contracts, paying rent, and hiring third-party
providers. Landlords can reject or accept applications in a single click, while
providing them with market data to make educated decisions about pricing. The
same goes for tenants.
Transparent: Tenants
will be able to see other bids on the property. They will also be able to
adjust their bids, making this a true auctionary platform. Tenants and
landlords will be able to rate each other by submitting reviews. Both parties
can access each other’s rental activity via the blockchain. Credit reports,
background checks, social media, bankruptcy records, eviction history, and past
due account information will also be combined with this information and
processed by Rentberry’s backend scoring system to create a tenant / landlord
score from 1,000-10,000.
Secure: The
platform will be transported to the blockchain, and BERRY used a means of
transacting. Scheduling, internal communications, renter and landlord profiles
and scores, will all be stored securely and cryptographically on the
blockchain. Tenant history will only be available to landlords upon application
for a rental, when the tenant cryptographically signs the application with
their private key.
Other proprietary
features:
Syndication: Using
BERRY tokens, landlords can promote their listing not only on Rentberry.com but
on additional rental sites that join the ‘Rentberry syndicate’.
Crowdsourced Security
Deposit Network: Members of Rentberry will be able to utilize BERRY to
fund other tenants’ rental security deposits as a type of loan. They will have
access to tenant history, information and scores. The benefit to funders will
be in the form of interest (3-7%) and ‘other’ rewards for tenants.
Unfortunately it does not seem that Rentberry has fully established how this
will work, and why funders would want to lock up their BERRY in this
investment, which may be subject not only to BERRY currency value fluctuations,
but dependent on the tenant not causing damage. An investor could make 3-7%
with more safety in the stock market, or much more with riskier crypto
investments. Additionally, not having tenants pay a deposit might remove some
of the incentive for them to take good care of their rental.
Auctioning technology: Rentberry
believes its technology used to negotiate bidding is intellectual property and
is currently filing for patent protection. The technology allegedly will allow
for landlords to appropriately price their property effectively in any market
conditions, and tenants the ability to seamlessly and transparently negotiate
and compete with other tenants. Of note, the application cost for a rental is
1000 BERRY. Any successful rental will have 950 BERRY go towards initial
payment, and 50 to Rentberry as a fee. All unsuccessful applications will have
funds returned.
Integrations with
blockchain and other companies: Rentberry mentions potential collaboration with
CIVIC for biometric identity verification, and APII for verified education and
professional records. They also mention integration with third party service
providers and utility companies to provide seamless utility bill payments.
These are purely hypothetical at the time of writing.
Smart locks: Team
is currently working on smart lock technology that can be used by landlords to
unlock a rental for a potential tenant to view the property. Identity would be
confirmed by CIVIC, and the previous issue in this space of electronic lock
battery life would be solved by using power from the tenants connected
smartphone.
Data generation and
utilization: The Rentberry platform will utilize a common theme in
blockchain space: data decentralization. The platform, with all data stored on
the platform, will offer tenants and landlords the option of commercializing
said data to be accessed by third parties. This will be under the control of
the user, compliant with security and privacy laws, and will reward users in
BERRY. Not noted, is what contact information will be provided to these
companies, if users opt for that level of data disclosure. We all know that
once your email is out there, there is very little control over whose hands it
ends up in. Therefore, this information would ideally be conducted within the
Rentberry platform.
Usecase for the BERRY
token:
The BERRY token will be
used for all payments on the platform. Landlords, after collecting rent in
BERRY, can pay for promotion, invest in security deposits, and hire maintenance
providers. Tenants can make rental payments in BERRY. Thus fees associated with
credit cards, wire transfers, bounced checks, etc will be removed, and security
of transaction with the immutable blockchain ledger.
TEAM:
Founders:
Alex Lubinksy - CEO
Investment banking
executive. Degree in Economics and Business Administration. Financial analyst
at Cisco, consultant for Deloitte, Director positions at investment firms, and
Co-Founder of CityHour, a business networking app.
Lily Ostapchuk –
Co-Founder and CPO
Was also CPO at
CityHour. Marketing director for a property management company, and a Ukraine
News agency. MSc in International Relations.
Aleksey Perfilov –
Co-founder and CTO
BA, Computer Science
(UC Berkeley). MSc. Management Science and Engineering (Standford). Also worked
at CityHour. Software engineer at Phoenix Technologies, Altera, Hi5, and Amazon
Music (still works there presently).
Notable Team Members:
Serge Gritsenko – COO
Agile Development
experience, Program Manager for ROLIK, Bazelevs (media group), and DIGI,
including vast experience managing developers and designers. Degree in Business
Economics.
Denys Golubovskiy –
Blockchain Developer
Rentberry position
includes developing REST APIs for AngularJS, setup infrastructure for the
project on Amazon Web Services, managing development team and estimate
features. Previously backend developer for Afterplay (iOS apps) and Trinetex
(diversified software IT company). MSc in Informational Security Management.
Eugene Terentev –
Senior Software Engineer
Has worked as a
freelancer, Big Data analytics software development for ZEO, Web developer for
a number of companies before that.
David Sviatozhenvsky –
Software Engineer
PHP specialist. BS in
Software Engineering. Previously worked as a PHP developer for Miritec
(software services company), and Kijiji (an ebay company).
Eugene Kurasov – Web
Developer
Exclusively PHP
developer for Tonic Health, iGid, and CodeIT. Attended a University of Radio
Electronics.
Alex Svityashchuk -
Software Developer
Web application
developer for Universal Commerce Group (present), Global Games, Nadavi Trade
System. PHP developer for Miritec. BS in Software Engineering, MS in System
Software.
Cautions:
The following
paragraphs outline some problems evident in Rentberry’s whitepaper and proposed
platform, at the time of writing. These are not meant to discourage or
encourage investing, but to provide insight on some of the challenges Rentberry
will face. An analysis of any blockchain company would identify many
challenges. The scaling issues being addressed by bitcoin at time of writing
are one good example.
• Rentberry’s website
has some formatting issues that were apparent on first use. This is surprising
for an already established business and given the company team has many (5)
frontend developers.
• The bonus structure
of their main ICO (volume bonus for purchasing 5+ETH and for large 300 ETH
purchasers) is not good practice. See Vitalik Buterin’s tweet for the
reasoning.
• There is a clear
unevenness in demand on their platform, as they have 224,000 properties listed,
but only 4000 rental applications processed. Additionally, given they have
already raised 4 million in capital and now need to raise more, it seems
unlikely that they are currently profitable.
• It is stated in their
whitepaper that landlords, collecting rent, could use the BERRY to pay for
promotion of their properties. This assumes that the landlord has more than one
property to rent, which is probably not the case for the average landlord.
• It is concerning that
there is no process outlined in the whitepaper to ensure liquidity of BERRY. In
general, a conversion of the platform completely to BERRY assumes that
cryptocurrencies have mass adoption, and this BERRY could then be used or
easily converted to a currency to be used in the real world. Given the current
state of crypto, landlords will want to liquidate their rent payments to fiat
so that they can use them (and also not expose themselves to currency
fluctuations). This doesn’t seem incredibly convenient, even though Rentberry’s
stated purpose is to make the rental process more convenient for all parties. Other
blockchain companies in this space seem to offer rental payments converted
automatically to any ERC20 token.
• It is also advisable
to go through their original bitcointalk forum and their newer one, as there
are some fraud allegations, although these have not been proven or disproven.
These forums are also filled with many good questions with answers provided
directly from the rentberry team.
