By: Michael DeFusco | Staff-Writer
You’ve done it, you’ve found the perfect house, in the perfect location, for the perfect price. Then you feel your phone pulsate in your pocket, you peak down and see a text from your agent; someone else got their deposit in first…you lost the house.
This painful process plagues many students, which is exactly why Adam Riesberg sought to create a simpler platform for students to rent houses with his company “Rent Beetle.”
Below is a lightly edited interview with Adam Riesburg.
Tell me a bit about Rent Beetle…how did you come up with that idea?
Adam: I was licensed my junior year of college and saw there was a big opportunity for students to find off-campus housing. So what would happen is landlords would talk to agents, and agents would take advantage of students by trying to fill these landlords’ places fast because they want to appeal to the landlord. I wanted to be different and I wanted to appeal to the student… but this was a very complicated process.
Let’s just take “123 Main Street,” for example…you have two groups who want the same house. My group will go in and tell the agent, “We want to rent out this house.” Agent would say, “Great, I have two other groups who want to rent out this house too, first one to get a deposit and their application in wins the house.” So, what ends up happening is one groups wins the house and the other two groups are spent looking for another place for the next two weeks and that process might repeat. So what Rent Beetle offers is a full streamlined process from top to bottom where you can sit in your dorm room and you can rent out a house in an hour as opposed to taking three weeks.
So how do you get the houses on the site…how do you acquire certain properties?
Adam: We have these things called open house listings: what landlords do is they contact as many agents as they can, we put all the rental listing they have on our site, so we’re not competing with agencies in the area. We’re actually working with them in order to create a more civil atmosphere for students.
What were some of the challenges initially with the development process?
Adam: Process is intricate because there are very specific real-estate laws that I have to abide by when doing this process. Processing credit card payments has never really been done before for rentals, because of the fees associated with it, but we found a way to counteract that… And [there’s] the overall worry of, “Are people going to like this? Are people going to use it?”
How can someone use this site right now?
A: Right now, you can book a showing on it for any place that you want and that is on our beta [website]. We’ve had 15 showings booked through it with very minimal marketing.
On October 16th (day beta ends and the full site is launched) what will the site be able to do?
Adam: So you’re going to be able to go on Rent Beetle, book a showing, then your going to see the house with the agent who has that listing. On Rent Beetle there’s a way to apply and you actually get to keep that in your profile. So if you’re standing right in front of [the agent] you can say, “I just sent over our applications right there on the property,” he’ll look at them, and then he clicks approve. Then once that’s approved, the payment processing and lease processing are open to you guys to use for specific properties. Once that’s approved, you can literally go on, put in your credit card information, and that payment is then sent to our Escrow account and not going to be used for anything else except for you until that lease is signed and then the website writes the lease right there. Then all the parties can sign off on it. You could do this in 20 minutes.
What’s different from you and other rental sites?
Adam: There’s a few competitors we have in the tech sphere…and what they don’t do, that Rent Beetle does, is it specifically works with agents. Those people want to cut out the agent all together and make everything online, and I personally want to work with the agents because that’s what’s going to make everybody happy. We’re an actual brokerage that’s going to be able to take in payments. We can actually take that payment processing and that’s what makes us different. We cater specifically to students.
How many houses do you have access too?
Adam: I’d say there’s about 120 to 150…for Newport and Middletown.
What’s some advice you would give to students looking for a house now?
Adam: Make sure you know the full scope of what you’re looking for. Don’t be afraid to tell the agent that you’re working with that you want to see a specific place. [Agents] know landlords, they’re going to try to make those landlords happy. The landlords that are going to pay them the most are the houses [that] they’re going to show first because they want the bigger commissions, so you kind of have to be wary. Understand that even if the agent talks a big game and he’s smiling all the time, he’s really not on your side, he’s really on the landlord’s side. Rent Beetle aims to curve that and now you can actually see places that you want to see.
When should students get started on the rental process?
Adam: Everybody thinks they have to find something in September, but I think that right now I have the nicest student rental property that there is in Newport and I found it in February. So I’m really trying to slow down the process because people just rush into this, and then agents cram listings down their throats and they say take it, take it- and there’s no need for that. There are always opportunities…don’t fret it if you don’t find a place in September.
What do you see for Rent Beetle in the future?
Adam: Our next step is Massachusetts. Obviously, we want to be competitive in Boston. If I’m able to do real estate in Connecticut and Massachusetts, as well as Rhode Island, so those three states… If we could have a stronghold with Rent Beetle in New England…that would be just fantastic.
Editor’s Note: At the time of this interview, Rent Beetle’s site was set to launch on October 15. This is incorrect; while the beta site is up, the full site will not be available until November.
Rent Beetle’s site can be found here.
Cover Image: Newport, Rhode Island by Doug Kerr is licensed under Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0)
