Invest in RentLab

RentLab's mission is to promote efficiency, sustainability, and affordability in rental housing.

Have you ever lived in a rental home with crazy high utility bills?  Tenants everywhere suffer the consequences of inefficient rental properties because of a fundamental barrier to progress: When tenants pay the utility bills, landlords have no incentive to invest in efficiency; when landlords pay the bills, tenants have no incentive to conserve. This nefarious "split incentive" problem impacts household budgets, but it also has big consequences for cities, and for the environment: No city can solve climate change if they don't solve climate change in rental housing.  

The split incentive problem prevents progress in the rental sector and makes housing costs unpredictable, but also means there are opportunities for efficiency and sustainability if we can find levers to impact rental markets.  Activating these levers is what RentLab is all about.

We have two current city clients, and are ready to launch our platform across the country.  The timing couldn't be better: housing markets are increasingly stretched and unaffordable, climate change is disrupting communities everywhere, and the federal government is making historic investments in both efficiency and affordability.  Communities - and tenants - need better tools, and they need them now.

The consequences of this inefficiency are significant for households, communities, and the environment.

RentLab focuses on empowering communities with information and tools to build resilience in the rental sector. We provide two primary services:

• First, we integrate and analyze existing information to provide communities with immediate, actionable insights into their rental sector, even in cities with limited data. This allows city partners to move quickly to implement efficiency and low-carbon measures like electrification.
• Second, we set up client communities on our public-facing, map-based platform to provide both tenants and landlords with the insights they need to make housing and investment decisions.  We also use the platform to gather information to fill data gaps.

Cities pay a yearly subscription fee, and gain access to regular platform updates and enhancements, customized analyses, and a growing library of resources to help move the needle in the rental sector.

Investors interested in bringing RentLab to their city can use their investments to "vote".  The more investors we get from a single city - at any dollar amount - the higher we'll rank that city to be the target of our next launch.

What we know

Getting tenants to consider more than basic info (like location and monthly rent) when making housing decisions is our biggest challenge, especially in a competitive market like this one. Getting landlords to see the value of "sustainability" as a wise investment is also a huge challenge.

However, we also know that:

• Tenants favor more sustainable, efficient properties when presented with this information in a clear, understandable way.
• Inefficiency has a real impact on tenant budgets and can destabilize and compromise the health and welfare of tenant households.
• Even landlords lack information about the relative efficiency and sustainability of their properties because the utility bills are often in the tenants' names.
• If we can't make rentals better, we won't be able to achieve critical community sustainability and affordability goals, including the emissions reductions goals that are necessary to mitigate climate change.

Tenants, landlords, and cities all need better transparency and more complete information. RentLab's platform provides them.

Business Model

While we've identified multiple potential revenue streams, we're starting with cities as clients because they're struggling to find solutions in this sector. New federal funding focused on climate solutions and affordability mean the time is now to address this problem.