#6 Founder’s Showcase: EasyRent (Toby, Jack, and Alex)
This week’s showcase, EasyRent, is making it easy to find and rent out rooms for 1–6 months.
They’re on a mission to build a global, open-border rental economy, where anyone can easily live in any city across the world for 1–6 months (mid-term).
What is the problem you’re solving, and how are you solving it?
Have you ever tried to find or rent out a room/home for 1–6 months? It’s a terrible experience, especially for Gen Z. This is a $400b problem worldwide.
We broke the problem down into three target segments:
- Moving to a new city for work
- Students
- Digital nomads
You might be thinking: ‘doesn’t Airbnb do monthly stays?’ Yes, they do. However, all of Gen Z we talked to haven’t used Airbnb when living or renting out a room for 1–6 months. Why? Their product isn’t built to live for the mid-term, and 20–24 year-olds have different needs compared to other demographics.
We asked all 60 of our users who found a room through us: “why didn’t you use Airbnb?” They required virtual viewings, sublet agreements, social media integrations to see who they were living with — and automated rent payments, not through a debit card. Airbnb doesn’t have a single one of these. One of our users said, “having the entire experience online plus the added security from rent payments and sublet agreements makes me so much more comfortable moving to a new city”.
Our vision is to build a global, open-border rental economy, where anyone can easily live in any city across the world for 1–6 months (mid-term).
Imagine a world where you can easily live in New York, Sydney, Queenstown and London for 3 months at a time all within one calendar year. Covid has disrupted the rental market forever and Gen Z needs flexible living options. We are at the forefront of the mid-term rental market, building for the future of Gen Z living.
What do you love most about being a founder in NZ?
It’s not easy starting out in one of the smallest markets in the world – with the hardest residential regulatory market too. However, the community of founders that’s been built here over the past year is absolutely world-class.
Massive shout-out to what Phase One has done bringing onboard incredible founders like Luke (Vxt), Dev & Sophia (Sugar Wallet), Sukhans (Zorbi), Ian & Jiao (Transactional AI) and many more all supporting one another 24/7. Mahesh has been the rock in the middle, and I believe the NZ ecosystem has begun to transform forever. No matter how bad or how good of a day you’re having, everyone’s there. I wouldn’t be here today without the community of founders I have around me and I believe every founder needs that. The beauty of having such a tight-knit ecosystem is that kiwis love to help no matter what stage you’re at.
Why are you working on EasyRent? What was the trigger point that made you start working on this?
I’ve been through the problem first-hand myself. When I was in my first year at university, I watched my friends collectively throw away over $100,000 during summer by leaving their rooms empty whilst still paying rent. I quickly realised they did this because it was too much hassle and risk to rent them out. It was here I started to uncover the massive problem of mid-term renting worldwide.
We are building for the future of Gen Z living, as this is the future we want to live in. If we don’t do it, maybe no one ever will. This is our ‘why’ and the reason we will be fixated on the mid-term rental market for the next 20+ years.
What is the current state of EasyRent? What does the product look like and what is your team focused on right now?
Easyrent.nz is our New Zealand marketplace site where you can browse our 250+ active listings and list rooms.
We’ve built a solution that makes it seamless to find or rent a room for 1–6 months by:
- Streamlining the browsing process
- Organising virtual viewings
- Automating the sublet agreements
- Connecting users bank accounts via open banking for hands-free rent payments
Currently, a lot of the process is managed manually through our team. This is an intentional tactic that allows us to keep learning and understanding. We’ve taken a page out of Paul Graham’s book and are doing things that don’t scale, to scale. However, over the coming months we’ll be transitioning to a fully automated experience as we rapidly grow.
Our #1 focus right now is achieving early signs of liquidity in Sydney.
What makes EasyRent unique?
We are the customers. As our target market grows older we do too. We are building for the future of Gen Z living as we are Gen Zs. Our team is absolutely obsessed with the problem and are fixated on building for PML (product market love). EasyRent is a people business and tech is just the enabler. This means for everything we do it’s people first: customer, team, and anyone who interacts with us.
We’ve been through deep problem discovery from February-August that has enabled us to truly understand the pain points of our super niche current customer base. This has allowed us to grow rapidly through network effects. We do not know if our current solution is the right one. We’ve already been through a significant pivot in February and expect many more moving forward until we build something incredible in the mid-term rental market. Why is this so important? Our team is constantly tracking every single trend and aspect of the problem to ensure that as the problem evolves, we do too.
This is our secret sauce: persistent learning and growing our offering as the problem expands. We will never have all the answers and believe the best founder in the room is not the smartest person but the fastest learner.
How are your customers doing? What is the traction like?
Traction (from 1st Sep — 1st Dec (4 months)):
- 60 rooms filled in 4 months across 7 cities in NZ
- Earning on average $266 per room
- Average 13-week duration
- 250 active listings
- $160,000 invoiced rental payments
- $16,000 generated in revenue
- $10k rental payments per week
- Processed Australasia’s first-ever open banking rent payment
- 10:1 network effect ratio (for every person that successfully uses us refers 10 friends)
Reviews our recent ‘lookers’ and ‘listers’ posted on their public Instagram stories:
“Thank you EasyRent, I can’t believe you filled my room in 2 hours!”
“Such a great service! I struggled so much finding a sublet last time. This has been very easy. Will be sure to tell everyone about it.”
“Massive shout to Toby and the team at EasyRent for making the experience painless.”
“Thank you so much EasyRent, my summer hero’s.”
How are you scaling?
We’ve developed a ‘Wellington Framework’, as we thrived in these conditions, which allows us to identify future target cities that match our four key indicators:
- Housing crisis
- High average rent
- A significant number of people who are originally from outside the city
- Large Gen Z population
Our expansion roadmap (next 24 months): Sydney, Melbourne, San Francisco, and New York.
What is another start-up in New Zealand that gets you excited?
Toby — Sugar Wallet
Jack — Vxt
Alex — Transactional AI
Who do you look up to for advice/inspiration? What’s your favourite piece of advice from them?
Brian Chesky, Airbnb Founder/CEO “Build something 100 people love, not something 1 million people kind of like.”
Our values on team and building for product market love are heavily aligned. They achieved something no one had ever done before, with Brian famously stating “there’s no edge to a market you create”.
I have the utmost respect for Brian but we’re definitely going to develop a fierce rivalry in the near future.
What would you say to someone interested in supporting or learning more about EasyRent?
- Just opened our pre-seed raise to speed up our Sydney growth, and have already filled a big chunk of the round. If you know of any investors who are as excited about the market opportunity as we are, please send Toby an email toby@easyrent.nz.
- Started beta launching in Sydney this week and would love intros to any marketplace founders or mentors in Sydney who can give us more insight into the market conditions.
- Feedback on our new Sydney site easyrentau.com.
- Follow our journey on EasyRent’s LinkedIn page.
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