Internet service for short-term lease Renthome.ru closes a $1M round of angel financing

An Internet service for short-term lease Renthome.ru has closed a $ 1 M round of angel financing held by Russian and foreign businessmen, representatives of the real estate market and the financial sector. This is targeted investment that will be used to develop a network of regional offices of the Internet service and marketing.

According to Yuri Boiko, a venture partner of Fast Lane Ventures, the Renthome.ru team attracted smart money. New investors do not only invest in the company, but also actively contribute to the development of its business.

The investments will be spent on regional development. In addition to Moscow, Renthome.ru will open its offices in 10 cities of Russia: in St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, Sochi, Kazan, Nizhny Novgorod, Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk, Krasnodar, Rostov-on-Don, Tyumen, as well as in Kiev, Ukraine.

Until now, the efforts to expand regional base was carried out by Moscow specialists and sales managers from the regional office in Ivanovo. For eight months, the company managed to create the largest database of real estate among all Russian online resources: about 17K (including approximately 2K in Europe) in 700 cities across Russia, CIS and Europe.

Forecast for the end of the year - 25 thousand objects. Each object gets at least one request per month from the visitors. This figure should rise to 3-5 by the end of the year, which is the standard for the western service of short term rental apartments.

Regional managers will meet with clients personally. In addition to the transactions, they will check the apartment for compliance with the description, and even help the owners of apartments in completing the profile, in particular, do high-quality images. The main objective of this work is to increase the credibility of each object and of Renthome.ru service, as well as the credibility of online services in general.

To achieve this goal the marketing budget will also be increased with an emphasis on the promotion of social networks. Website visitors will be our brand ambassadors and audience at the same time, - says Midar. - If the picture on the website and the interiors of the apartment do not match, people will always write about it.

The CEO of Renthome.ru Company Dwight Linden hopes that with the help of regional expansion and marketing support the internet service will significantly increase all key business indicators until the end of the year.

Renthome.ru operates on a promising and rapidly growing market. The volume of short-term rental housing market in Russia will double every year as predicted by company’s experts. There are several reasons for it: the growing popularity of domestic tourism first. Secondly, the number of people who traveled around Russia (including business trips) that amounted to 96.4 M people in 2011.

In this case, according to RBC’s study, 60% of respondents prefer to travel Russia on their own, without using travel agencies’ services. This means that they will be looking for housing on the Internet. And having regard to the shortage of hotel space (4.5 places per 1 thousand people compared to 13-35 in European countries) and high prices, most travelers choose an apartment than a hotel.