October 12, 2009
By the ZippyCart Shopping Carts Content Team
Renthop.com is looking to sweep in and capitalize on the rough housing market, which has made it hard for many apartment managers and owners to fill all their units. The site was founded by Lee Lin and Lawrence Zhou who are both former Microsoft developers turned hedge fund employees. They invested $20,000 of their own money and nine months of time to launch RentHop. Currently focused on the New York market, the site will allow you to browse available apartments, most of which do not charge pricey broker fees, which can be hard to come up with during the economic recession. Most brokers charge a fee of about 15% of the rent for one year of the apartment, but this strategy only worked when there were little to no vacancies in most places and property owners had the advantage. In the current market their are millions of vacant apartments across the U.S., which is resulting in a significant loss in revenue for these property owners and brokers. This is why RentHop is positioned well to succeed as the economy slowly picks back up and more people start to upgrade or move to a new apartment.
Craigslist would have to be the most direct competition for the site, but RentHop has a superior search engine that is better to browse and compare rental properties by a variety of criteria. The ecommerce business model is also very different than that of Craigslist which charges a basic flat fee for their listings. What RentHop does in their pricing model is charge the property owners a half months rent for each lease that is signed as a result of the site. Despite doing very well thus far, and starting to increase listings and revenue, the site is at a point where they are looking to raise additional money to grow and expand their tool to the masses. Hopefully their positive traction continues and new investors see the strength in their ecommerce business model which will inspire them to invest.
Scott is an avid fan of all things ecommerce. His claim to fame is that he "puts the Zip in ZippyCart." He considers himself the world-wide number one reader of TechCrunch, C|Net, and The Ecommerce Times. Scott has worked in the SEO industry for many years, but found himself always shifting his focus to review sites and ecommerce blogs. When we decided to start the ZippyCart Ecommerce news, Scott was an obvious fit. He handles most of our OpEds as he is a very opinionated guy. Scott is also our Twitter guy, so don't hesitate to send him a tweet if you see him online.
