Jeremy Goldschmidt and the business of keeping the keys

Jeremy Goldschmidt had done the difficult part. He had saved for a deposit and bought his first rental property. Then came the property manager and the agreement. Looking at the arrangement, he wondered whether he wanted to hand over responsibility for an investment he had worked so hard to acquire. There are more glamorous beginnings for a technology company. Few involve quite so much paperwork.

He decided to manage the property himself. Later, family members and friends asked how he was doing it. Their friends began asking too. The questions gave his private experiment a second life: something useful to one owner might be useful to many. By 2016, he had founded RentBetter, a platform intended to put professional property management tools within reach of owners who preferred to remain in charge.

That beginning matters because the company asks customers to change a habit. Buying a property and appointing an agent can feel like consecutive parts of a single transaction. Goldschmidt separated them. Ownership, in his telling, could come with a different operating arrangement. Software could help an owner organise the work, while the owner kept the decisions. The keys were already in the right hands; the missing piece was a workable system.

A consultant brings his own problem to work

RentBetter began alongside a corporate job. Goldschmidt was working at ANZ when he started it, giving the venture the familiar, slightly misleading title of side hustle. A business may begin on the side of a calendar without staying politely within its allotted space. The company eventually became his full-time work.

His earlier career included management consulting at IBM, Capgemini, Blackdot and Boston Consulting Group, followed by banking strategy. Those are useful places to learn how organisations work. They are also places where somebody else usually supplies the problem. With RentBetter, Goldschmidt arrived with his own.

The connection is easy to see in the product's subject matter. Property management contains recurring tasks, information that needs to reach the right person, and decisions delayed by missing details. A consultant can draw that on a whiteboard. An owner has to live with it. Goldschmidt's experience put him on both sides of that distinction, giving a familiar business exercise an unusually personal deadline: the next tenancy.

He has also taken the explanation outside the company. His published articles at Your Money & Your Life cover becoming a landlord, property returns and the responsibilities of owning a rental. The recurring subject is the work after the purchase. A property transaction gets a signing day. The administration keeps its own hours.

A tenant is somebody’s customer

In explaining RentBetter to the Finance and Coffee community, Goldschmidt made a point that can get lost in a discussion of fees: tenants are customers. They pay for a product or service, and deserve to be treated with respect. Direct contact, he argued, could improve a relationship sometimes strained by the person standing between owner and renter.

That is his argument for the model, rather than a promise that every direct relationship will be easy. Its logic gives the software a particular job. Information has to move quickly enough for an owner to respond. Payments, documents and maintenance requests need somewhere orderly to go. Control is only useful when the person holding it can see what needs doing.

The platform groups work that otherwise spills across messages, files and bank records. Advertising and applications lead into checks and lease documents; the tenancy then produces payments, expenses and repairs. The product follows that sequence. Its organising idea is continuity: the owner who finds a tenant should be able to manage the resulting relationship without assembling a fresh collection of systems.

There is a pleasingly ordinary quality to this ambition. Rental administration rarely offers a cinematic climax. A receipt arrives, a document is available, a request reaches the person able to answer it. For a founder building around this work, those small completions are the product. The point is to make them dependable enough that customers can get on with something else.

Doing it yourself, with a little company

Goldschmidt also recognised a practical limit to the phrase self-management. Owners cannot always be near their properties. They may want to make the decisions while asking somebody else to perform a particular job. By April 2022, he was describing a feature that allowed customers to book professionals for services such as inspections and condition reports.

That arrangement gives his founding idea some useful flexibility. Keeping responsibility need not require opening every door yourself. A customer can choose help for a specific task without handing over the whole tenancy. It is a more accommodating version of doing it yourself, with room for distance, diaries and the inconvenient fact that people have other commitments.

Partnerships matter to that approach. The Finance and Coffee relationship brought RentBetter into a mortgage broker community, placing its explanation in front of people who speak with property buyers. The workshop Goldschmidt leads serves a related purpose: it takes owners through a five-step framework, practical implementation and questions. Showing somebody how the work fits together is part of persuading them to attempt it.

His conversations have extended to property and business podcasts, including Financial Autonomy, Get Invested and Stories of Scale. Each gives him room to explain a proposition that needs more than a slogan. A prospective customer has a reasonable question: what happens after I decide to do this? The answer has to survive contact with the ordinary jobs of a tenancy.

The numbers acquire another zero

In January 2022, RentBetter secured A$1.9 million in funding. The business already covered the span from rental advertising to payments and receipts. Capital gave that work a larger audience and a company behind it with more room to develop.

September 2026 brought a further A$5 million from EVP. Goldschmidt said RentBetter was profitable and had chosen to raise money to accelerate expansion. The plan included hiring and developing AI tools for recurring rental tasks, while EVP partner Justin Lipman was set to join as a director. These are plans for the next stage, with the everyday rental process still at their centre.

The investment changes the scale of the undertaking. Goldschmidt's initial question concerned one property and one management arrangement. A decade later, it has attracted an investor whose work involves helping software companies grow. More money also creates a fresh version of the founder's old problem: deciding where attention will do the most good.

His own announcement shared the credit widely. He thanked colleagues including Paul Ferrett, Jodie Cartmer, Allison Marrill and Dan Milstein, as well as advisers and supporters who had helped the business along. Company building appears there as a collective activity. The founder gets to announce the milestone; many other people have helped make the announcement possible.

A whiteboard has to become a team

Ferrett's path into the company offers a closer view of how that collective developed. Before becoming chief technology officer, he spent six months advising RentBetter and working with Goldschmidt. He joined from Catch.com.au, bringing a different personal connection to the problem: years spent renting homes.

That is a useful pairing. Goldschmidt approached the business as an owner who wanted greater control. Ferrett understood the frustrations from the renter's side. Their accounts put two participants in the same transaction inside the product conversation. A rental platform has to make sense to both, however firmly its founder's story begins with a landlord.

Ferrett described wanting to build the team so it could deliver more, faster. The progression from adviser to executive also suggests a practical way of establishing a working relationship: spend time on actual problems before taking on a larger role. Software companies are built through such decisions as much as through funding rounds.

Goldschmidt has been equally plain about the difficulty of keeping a growing company focused. Asked about the challenge in 2022, he talked about resisting attractive new opportunities and concentrating on a few priorities. “Stay focussed,” was his instruction to himself. For somebody selling owners greater control of their time and assets, choosing what the company will do next is a particularly fitting discipline.

“Invest in the right people”Jeremy Goldschmidt, on protecting his business, 2020

The calendar leaves room for a life

There is another side to that interest in control. On Stories of Scale in October 2023, Goldschmidt discussed building a company alongside family life, organising time for focused work and preparation, and making progress in small steps. The subject was how to keep a business moving within a life that contains other claims on a founder's attention.

In an earlier account of his routine, he described mornings with his three children before turning to operations, team planning and business development. He liked a whiteboard and the exchange of ideas around it. His reading included The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz; he also enjoyed Michael Lewis's Against the Rules. Friends had given him an electric scooter for his birthday. Even a software founder occasionally appreciates a product with handlebars.

One aspiration was especially modest in its extravagance: a week set aside to read and think, inspired by Bill Gates's approach. A week is a small unit on an investor's horizon and a substantial piece of a working parent's calendar. Wanting one says something recognisable about running a company. There is always another message to answer before the thinking can begin.

The rental that prompted RentBetter has become a much larger undertaking, but Goldschmidt's questions remain close to ordinary experience. Who is looking after this? Can I see what is happening? Could I do the job differently? He has spent a decade turning those questions into software, explanations and a team. Somewhere beneath the new funding and the next set of features is the owner who read an agreement and decided to keep the keys.