Trustbond launches in Australia
We are happy to announce the launch of Trustbond in Australia, an innovative financial product to help eliminate the rental deposit that people are required to pay their landlords when they rent a new home. Rental deposits are simply a very inefficient form of “insurance”, where all the bad things that could happen are paid upfront. This status quo is not right.
When I first moved to the US, I was asked to pay $14,000 deposit, simply because as an immigrant I did not have a credit score, and so I could not be trusted, regardless of my education or work history. This deposit is a big burden for young families, students, recent grads, freelancers and many other people who are forced to freeze their savings and suffer from cashflow precisely the month they are moving in, when they have many other expenses to take care of.
Trustbond uses the Traity technology to assess people’s credibility by leveraging social and market networks, so we don’t need credit scores, and thus we are helping people get access to housing and financial services based on trust and reputations, which we believe is the beginning of something Huge. One application at a time, we will replace unfair credit scores for good.
Trustbond also writes a ledger of the tenant's rental history in Blockchain. This is important because rental histories are an expensive and inefficient part of the rental application process which makes sense to be shared in a worldwide ledger that can travel with tenants in a timestamped profile.
We expect that in most cases, tenants will be great and landlords will not need to make claims, just like in AirBnB most people leave the property in mint condition. In the cases of claims, we will always pay the landlord with a surety bond. We will not recover from tenants in case of accidents that could happen to all of us, or case of financial hardship, which is the way things should be, instead of paying upfront for everything that could go wrong.
We launched first in South Australia in stealth mode and already have a few happy customers who are loving to keep their savings to themselves and reduce the barriers to enter the rental market. We will roll out across Australia and then the rest of the Globe.
If you have any questions, reply or tweet @jc2go!
