House-hunting horror stories have become commonplace, with Aussies and immigrants grappling with rising rents. To alleviate some of the stress, rental platform Rent.com.au (ASX: RNT) recently expanded its rental payments platform RentPay to accommodate more digital wallets. As a result, the Company has achieved the significant milestone of processing $250 million of payments since its relaunch in May 2021.
Growth is accelerating, with the most recent $100 million coming twice as fast as the previous $100 million. More than 8,900 active renters are now using RentPay. Plus, the Company noted a record pipeline growth, with more than 4,000 new tenants preparing for onboarding.
CEO Greg Bader commented, “RentPay is key to the future growth of the group. It provides an annuity style revenue stream that helps insulate us from seasonality or market fluctuations within our traditional Renter Product and Advertising Sales revenue streams. Importantly, it allows us to serve renters beyond just the ‘movers’ market and address the entire renting population that makes up 32% of our country”
Rent.com.au offers a suite of rental products, including ID checks, bonds, moving services and RentPay. RentPay allows users to choose how and when to pay, access emergency funds, build credit scores, and save.
Through a strategic partnership expansion with digital payments company Novatti Group (ASX: NOV), Rent.com.au now offers international wallets like Alipay, WeChat Pay, and UnionPay alongside traditional payment methods. This will help differentiate the Company in light of the growing migration to Australia. Expats, students or recent immigrants can pay their rent in Australia using the banks (or payment solutions) they’re familiar with.
Rent.com.au also recently announced a partnership with a savings-centered FinTech company Paylab. It’s a product that provides a rental discount to customers based on their everyday spending—thus figuratively fighting one cost of living crisis (rising rent) with another (rising grocery prices).
Customers can earn between 3% and 15% across all major retailers and then apply those rewards to their RentPay account to reduce their weekly rent by shopping where they currently shop. A trial has been launched, and the take-up has been good, with over 5% of RentPay customers opting into Paylab. The Company has already seen $1,000 offset against rent.
Bader added, “We’ve gone from 100% of our revenue being transactional, in other words non-recurring, to now seeing more and more of it being annuity or recurring revenue. O3 FY24 was a record revenue quarter for the Group, with strong Renter Product and Advertising Sales revenues, yet the compounding nature of RentPay’s revenue meant that the share of Group revenue that came from recurring revenue still increased”
During Q3 FY24, Rent.com.au saw a pause in bulk migration of rent rolls by agencies because it was peak moving time and, therefore, incredibly busy. Nevertheless, its sales continued and it now has a pipeline of tenants to be onboarded that matches its entire CY23 growth.
Alinda is a Business Reporter for The Sentiment
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