Rent.com.au Gets A$2.5M From Investors to Market RentPay FinTech Product

The Australian rental marketplace specialist Rent.com.au has secured A$2.5 million from its investors to fund a marketing campaign for its flagship RentPay product and promote its core portal offering.

Rent.com.au started life as a rentals portal in Western Australia in 2007 and in recent years has diversified its offerings to include ancillary products around rental transactions including a move-now-pay-later product, an ID and history check product, a renter and pet resumé and its RentPay product.

Launched in May 2021 after 18 months of development and several years after its original conception, RentPay lets tenants pay their rent via an app while enabling them to build a reliability scoring and a 'buffer' amount to protect landlords. The company has put a lot of eggs in the RentPay basket with development costs of $698k capitalised in Q4 and $273k spent on launching and optimising the product.

The money tapped from investors via a private share placement at an issue price of $0.06 will be used to fuel the marketing of RentPay as well as the company's portal offering, with the portal driving awareness of RentPay. The offering was oversubscribed with investors keen to back the new product and see the company's share price on the ASX reap the rewards according to CEO Greg Bader:

"Our initial target was for $2 million, but we were well oversubscribed and have closed the placement at A$2.5 million. With RentPay now live in the market, we’ve seen how our customers access the benefits of RentPay, from flexibility and control over their rent, to making their rent money work harder for them through features such as our industry-first Scorebuilder. We have also seen increasing interest from real estate agents that understand the value this can offer, both to their tenants but also to their bottom line by improving the efficiency of their own businesses."

Rent.com.au has already signed on New York-based Marketing Guru Hayley Parker to lead the charge and is promoting RentPay through partnerships with rental agencies down-under. The company's core portal business has been EBITDA positive for over a year and Rent.com.au is now looking to scale its flagship FinTech product and diversify its revenue base further.