Tomas Ronis is the founder and CEO of Rhenti. Being both a landlord and a renter, Tomas has a unique perspective of the residential rental industry that enables the Rhenti team to build digital leasing tools for landlords in a way that shifts renters to the forefront of the experience.
Rhenti is the busy landlord's trusted leasing platform, connecting them with more renters, faster. Rhenti helps busy landlords to protect their time and free themselves from menial and tedious tasks by reducing their overall time to lease.
In my interview with Tomas, we discuss:
•What is Rhenti and how does it work
•What kind of property owners would get the most out of Rhenti
•Something we wish property owners and landlords understood more about the leasing process
•What we are seeing in the market right now
As a listener of the Burn Your Mortgage Podcast, Rhenti is happy to offer listeners $60 Off on your first listing (for new clients only). To get this exclusive offer, email me at sean@burnyourmortgage.ca.
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Full Transcript
Sean Cooper
Hi, Tomas, how are you doing today? Ah, I'm great, super excited to discuss a great platform for landlords as well as renters. Because, yes, certainly being a landlord, there are tasks that you have to take care of, and they may not be the most fun things and finding a high quality tenant is very important as well. So interested to hear how your platform helps with all that there.
Tomas Ronis
Yeah, happy to tell you more about Rhenti. So we're at the top of the funnel system for long term residential rentals. So that means marketing and leasing automation, we really help with process efficiency, user experience, and of course, data insights, which are always important, whether you're big or small landlord at a granular level, the way that landlords and property managers use our platform is they either we integrate with their property management system and ingest all their their properties into our system, or they can manually create properties in our system.
Tomas Ronis
And then we help them with all the marketing, we generate ads across all the top listing sites, social media, Google, you name it, and then we help you generate as many renter eyeballs or renter prospects as possible. And then we help you nurture all those renter prospects all the way through lease sign, deposit handled, and everything in between. So booking viewings, credit checks, references, etc, we help you with everything from start to finish into the top of the funnel.
Sean Cooper
Wow, that sounds very helpful. And maybe you could just explain how somebody would normally do that. And how much time you can spend with Rhenti. And how is the experience just overall that much easier?
Tomas Ronis
Yeah, so obviously, there's differences. There's a lot of inconsistency in the market and the way that people do it. Lots of different processes, lots of different systems. If you're a mom and pop landlord, you may just be using email, maybe a spreadsheet, if you have, you know, 300 doors, 100 doors or more. If you're in the 1000s of doors, you probably have a variety of systems in place. And historically, landlords have had to either do things manually, or cobbled together like a Frankenstein type solution, where the experience is not very great. There's no data continuity from one system to the other.
Tomas Ronis
One of opacity for both sides of the equation, whether you're a renter, whether you're like someone doing the leasing or marketing work. And what we do is we bring it all under one roof, we automate a lot of the process we picked ChatGPT into the systems that helps you answer prospect inquiries and helps you get viewings booked applications kind of submitted.
Tomas Ronis
So we really do take a process where traditionally you may have taken you call it 15 hours of human input time to lease to market at least one residential rental with our system, we bring that down under an hour per residential rental unit in terms of that human input that's required, because of all the smart automation and experience improvements we've done to the system. And also kind of bringing all of that under one roof really helps with the process.
Sean Cooper
Sounds pretty amazing. Well, you definitely convinced me they're. Great. Well, following up on that. Tomas, can you tell me what kind of property owners would get the most out of Rhenti?
Tomas Ronis
Yeah, that's a great question, Sean. Thanks. We started life in 2019. And we designed the platform exclusively for Mom and Pop landlords or small business landlords. So anyone who has between one and 50 doors since then, and so that experience has been built out for that segment. Since then, we've built out many kinds of more complex enterprise type features. But it really is a great, simple, intuitive, easy to use experience for someone that has one basement unit, all the way through, you know, someone that may have a little rice building with 10, or 20 units, is really great for that.
Tomas Ronis
And it really does shine, when you have a very limited team. Or if you're just on your own. If you're managing on your own and you maybe you have a full time job on the side, or you have a full time job and you're doing this on the landlording on the side, the system really helps you make the most of your time, because it's going to save you a ton of time with the admin work. It's going to save you time when it comes to doing your reference checks, your credit checks, collecting documentation, booking viewings, even answering questions from prospective renters. Because you are going to get a fair bit of questions from renters that are maybe just kicking the tires are serious, or the system really helps you weed out who's legitimately interested in your property. And then of those who're going to be a really good fit for your residential rental.
Sean Cooper
Well, that's great, because my experience with the landlord is that you have a lot of unserious people. And yes, if you could just use certain systems and processes just like you said, weed out the odd serious people that could really save you a lot of time because there's just a lot of back and forth. And yeah, so there's some sort of Rhenti that can just help people save time. There's only so many hours in the day. That sounds very helpful in that way as well as many other ways.
Tomas Ronis
Yeah, absolutely. You know, I'll give you like one example of it. So let's say you have a well priced rental in the annex of Toronto, you're proud I'm looking to get 50 prospect inquiries per day, there's a lot of demand in the area. And if you have a full time job, how can you engage with those inquiries in real time, it's very difficult or impossible. And if you don't engage with prospects, you know, within 30 minutes of their inquiry, you may lose them because some other landlord is going to respond to them.
Tomas Ronis
So it's really important to have that real time engagement. And our system lets you do that in a hands off approach, you switch, you click a button that says, you know, enable the ChatGPT powered leasing assistant, and that leasing assistant is going to be your first line of defense are going to answer your questions day and night in a very considerate human way. And they're going to nudge renters, and ideally, help you filter out folks that are not interested from the folks that are indeed interested, they're going to kind of nudge them automatically towards booking viewing with you, and then going through the screening process as well. So it really does give you superpowers as a mom and pop landlord.
Sean Cooper
That sounds amazing. And also my experience as a landlord, I just find that a lot of the prospective tenants don't bother to read the listing that carefully and they miss important things in the listing, they just quickly look at the photos and scan it I'd be I'm just curious that does Rhenti help with that at all? Because yeah, you have a lot of unqualified people reaching out to you and they don't even take the time to read the listing properly. Is that something that helps as well?
Tomas Ronis
Yeah, that's a very common problem where the data is provided by the landlord and listing renters are applying or they're kind of nudging lots and lots of landlords, via a variety of different listing sites. What our system helps you do is it consolidates all those inquiries in one place. So all of your messages, regardless of what kind of social site kind of was the originator of that prospect. It consolidates it all into one CRM chat kind of hub. And then our system can answer questions based on the data in your listing.
Tomas Ronis
So if you say that you do have one covered parking spot and one uncovered parking spot, our system or leasing assistant will be able to answer that based on what you provide as input. So it cuts out all of those types of questions of prospects, prospect renters, not necessarily reading your complete listing details. So that one is completely eliminated by our platform.
Sean Cooper
Now that sounds great. And just want to understand that your platform and alternative way to list your property or does it work in conjunction with the existing ways to list your property out there like the Facebook marketplaces, Kijiji and Craigslist to the world?
Tomas Ronis
Yeah, so that's one of the really powerful things about our platform, it becomes your replacement for listing on those sites. And so we have business relationships with the social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, we also have one with Google, and then all the top listing sites, apartments.com Kijiji, ViewIt etc, Zillow, we have direct connections with all those sites. And so when you create a listing and Rente, we automatically push ads to all of those locations.
Tomas Ronis
So you don't have to go one by one, and manually create ads. And then even more importantly, we connect all those different ads back to that one account to kind of rule them all. So if you update your ad in Rhenti, it'll automatically update your ad across all the different sites at once. And again, leaving crazy all comes in through one place. So you don't have to go one by one, it saves you a ton of time, creating listings, creating a variety of accounts, and then managing those kinds of notification flows from different places. We bring it all under one roof.
Sean Cooper
Wow, it sounds great, yes, I have rented places before and it can be a lot of work, just monitoring all the messages from the various websites there. So it sounds pretty great to me. So yes, switching gears here. What is something you wish property owners and landlords understood more about the leasing process? I'm sure there's a lot but maybe you can boil it down to one or two things.
Tomas Ronis
Yeah, the leasing process is not trivial. And it's a huge amount of work. To build a great community, even if it's a community of just like one rental unit, or, you know, a handful of rental units, landlords, property managers, they need to provide a really good, great experience for renters, that has trust, transparency, and ease of use built into it, you know, via email doing that manually with an Excel sheet is it's just not possible.
Tomas Ronis
You really need good systems and processes in place to make this work. So the humans kind of behind that process behind the leasing and the renting activities that can be released to do to be human and to be really kind of like, consider it with renters, and provide those things that they need to basically make the best match, right? You want the best fit renter for your rental and having the right processes and systems in place to help you do that.
Sean Cooper
Wow sounds great, and is there a second thing that you wanted to mention in terms of understanding the leasing process there?
Tomas Ronis
Yeah, I think part of that maybe at some additional kind of color on that answer is that as a landlord, you of course want to get to know your prospect renters and the folks that are applying really well. And you want to make it easy to kind of tease out that information from renters, they're not going to want to just give you everything all at the beginning, because it's a bit jarring and could raise some flags, but you want to kind of do it at the right moments in the journey.
Tomas Ronis
And so one of the things that's important is, as that renter shows more interest in your rental unit, it gives you kind of the ability, the freedom to then ask additional questions that help you assess if it's going to be the right fit. And both ways like that renter wants to know if you're going to be the right fit for them as well.
Tomas Ronis
And so doing that in a very in a staged considerate manner, I think is really important to kind of build that trust in the process. And of course, that's something that we help you do automatically, you don't even have to think about it. Because we've kind of done so many of these leases. And we've helped so many landlords that we know when it is the right time to ask the right question from a prospect, and then help you kind of build your that person through that prospect's profile.
Sean Cooper
Sounds pretty good to me. So yes, if you have been hesitating to be a landlord, just because you're worried about some of these steps. Rhenti sounds like a great tool that can help make the process easier for you so that you finally take the jump and buy that investment property. Great.
Sean Cooper
And we spoke about this question offline here. And yes, it's an interesting question, because a lot of landlords may not think of it. But yes, can you talk about what the renter experience is like on Rhenti? And why is that important for the landlord as well?
Tomas Ronis
That's a good question, John, and initially may not seem like it's super relevant to landlords, but it actually is, if you want to be a landlord that, you know, attracts great tenants and you want to build, of course, like a community, even if it's a small community, then it's really important to give renters a great experience in the renting process, you need to remove redundant work from their plate, remove opacity. And I like to it's kind of like to lighten the process to like the one click Checkout, give that renter, that like wow type experience, so that they've had with like, let's say, some sort of E commerce site where it's that one click, you purchase I think you wanted and it kind of arrived in your home and you'd have that wow moment, we want to give them that kind of wow moment, in the kind of the renting process, because it doesn't really exist historically hasn't existed historically.
Tomas Ronis
That's what our system tries to strive for. But we think that doing that has been overlooked in the past. Many legacy kinds of approaches to renting don't really have the renter in mind, they really do focus on the landlord. But we think that if you can give the renter a really good experience, you increase your chances of finding that renter, that's going to be a really good fit for you. So it shouldn't be overlooked. And we like to really focus on that renter experience throughout our platform.
Sean Cooper
No, you bring up a really great point Tomas because for example, you're working with a Mom and Pop landlord who doesn't have all this technology, assisting them, they make you fill in all these paper forms, and you're providing a ton of information. But with Rhenti if the process is really smooth, like other landlords asking me for all this information, and it's a really clunky process, I'd be more inclined to rent from some, like a landlord where the process is a lot easier. Because yeah, it can be frustrating when you have to provide all this information. And it seems like you pretty much have to provide your whole life story. So yeah, if that process can be a lot smoother, I think that increases your chances of getting a high quality tenant as a landlord.
Tomas Ronis
Yeah. And to go with that, one of the things that kind of helps that narrative is that a renter that has created a profile in Rhenti, what we've noticed over the years is that they start to use that profile as almost like a social media profile for renting. Because it can be reused to apply to multiple properties in our network. And so think of it more like a renting passport. And if they can use that passport to apply that to a unit really easily. That's a huge advantage that you'll have over other landlords.
Sean Cooper
And just from a trust standpoint, I would imagine there's feedback that people can leave for landlords as well as renters. Just seeing that feedback, genuine feedback on the platform, I think would help a lot because like the old cliche is that when you're asking for a reference from a tenant, their last landlord may not like them. So they'll give them a good reference just to get rid of them. But if there's a genuine way to actually see the feedback on people that I think that will be very helpful as well.
Tomas Ronis
Yeah. And we actually asked for that feedback very early in the process. And so as a prospect renter that has just done a viewing, for example, through our system, they say they booked the viewing through Rente the landlord's accepted it system says calendar invites reminders, the day after reviewing, we send a request for feedback and we share that with the landlord so they can get feedback in real time, you know, to improve whatever they're doing and that viewing processes it very much as a sales pitch when a renter is coming to see your place as a landlord you're pitching them on The neighborhood, you're pitching them on the property, the neighbors. And if you're doing something wrong, the feedback that we have in our system will tell you very early on, on how to perhaps adjust or iterate to give you better chances with the next viewing. And thereafter. So yeah, super important.
Sean Cooper
Well, you sold me on Rhenti. Great. That sounds very helpful in terms of all the tools that you're offering there. And, yeah, just switching gears here. Just before I let you go, I just want to ask you, what are you seeing in the rental market in major cities across Canada? Yeah, pretty much all across Canada. Here, we've focused a bit on the GTA, but if you could comment, what's going on in the rest of the country from landlords as well as experience? I'll be great, just to get some insight from you.
Tomas Ronis
Yeah, so we operate across Canada. And we definitely have seen, we saw a lot of demand from renters, first half of the year, also going through the summer, lots of leases happening nationally. And over the past six to eight weeks, we've seen a big slowdown in demand from renters, not just reduced leases, but also like reduced inquiries. So folks shopping have really slowed down. And my best guess is that this is related to two things. One is the consistent rise in rent prices, which has been like unrelentless, over the past couple of years.
Tomas Ronis
And coupled with the impact of inflation on like, general cost of living. So the cost of living is going up, rents are going up. This is I think the result of budgets being stretched, and there may not be a lot of room to kind of continue that price growth for rent prices. So I think that we're probably going to see rent prices, like the growth is going to start to level out, or perhaps incentives are going to start to hit the market like temporary incentives to help fill vacancies. That's what we're seeing right now.
Sean Cooper
And what advice would you give to a landlord right now if they're renting their property, and they're kind of caught in that bit of a lull right now, what would you say to them?
Tomas Ronis
I'd say that, of course, they have to weigh the cost of reducing their rent price versus months of lost rent if they can't fill a vacancy. So it is a bit of a balance. One interesting tool that we saw being used very effectively over the past couple years is the temporary incentives. So one or two months off, if you signed before this date kind of thing. And so it gives you sure, you may have a bit of reduced rent for the first year. But thereafter, you kind of get that rate that you want it and it helps you minimize any months of loss rent. So these incentives are, I think, super useful tools. The other could be just reducing your list price and really looking for a good fit renter as opposed to trying to maximize the rent price you can get right now, having a really great tenant far outweighs getting an extra 100 bucks a month. My opinion.
Sean Cooper
I agree completely. So thanks so much for joining me today on the podcast. I'll certainly be checking out Rhenti and myself and I hope everyone will as well and it's been a pleasure speaking with you and getting your insight into the rental market and better understanding how Rente is a great tool for landlords. So thank you very much for being on the podcast.
Tomas Ronis
Thanks for having me, Sean. Great to chat with you.
Sean Cooper
Thanks for listening to another episode of the Burn Your Mortgage podcast. Besides being a podcast host, I'm also an independent mortgage broker. If you or anyone you know, family, friends, co workers or neighbors could ever use any unbiased mortgage advice or a second opinion, feel free to reach out. Email me at Sean that's sean@burnyourmortgage.ca or call or text me at 647-867-3711 for a free mortgage consultation.
Sean Cooper
Also, be sure to head on over to www.burnyourmortgage.ca and sign up for my free weekly newsletter. As a small token of my appreciation, you'll be able to download my ultimate mortgage checklist on choosing the perfect mortgage. I look forward to hearing from you and helping you with all your mortgage needs. Once again, thanks for listening.