The self-management platform that hands Australian landlords the tools agents use - and lets them keep the fee.
About fifteen years ago, Jeremy Goldschmidt bought his first rental property. He read the management agreement, looked at the ongoing fee, and had the thought that eventually became a company: there has to be a better way. Most people file that thought away. Goldschmidt, a former Boston Consulting Group and ANZ strategy consultant, kept pulling on it - first as a set of tips he shared with friends and family, then, from 2016, as a platform.
That platform is RentBetter. Its pitch is straightforward: give everyday property owners the same tools and services real estate professionals rely on to lease and manage residential property - listings, tenant screening, digital leases, rent collection, condition reports, inspections and maintenance - but priced so the owner can do the work themselves and skip the property manager's ongoing cut. In a country with roughly 2.2 million landlords and 3.1 million investment properties, RentBetter is betting that a large share of them would rather manage well than pay to have it managed for them.
“Do it better.”
RentBetter's stated mission, in two wordsRentBetter takes a process most people find intimidating and gives it a spine - three plain-English stages that cover the full life of a tenancy. A landlord can step in at any one of them.
Advertise on realestate.com.au and Domain, field enquiries and applications, screen applicants through the National Tenancy Database, and create state-specific leases with digital signing.
Set up tenants, complete condition reports, collect bond and rent with automated reminders and receipts, track expenses and bill tenants - all in one place.
Generate reports, coordinate maintenance, schedule routine inspections and store documents for the ongoing life of the property.
Around the three pillars sits a marketplace of optional add-ons - tenant checks, professional photography, tradesperson hiring, landlord insurance and tax depreciation schedules - so an owner buys only the help they actually need.
RentBetter's customer is the everyday landlord - typically someone with one or a few investment properties who baulks at handing over 5-8% of rent, month after month, to an agent. For years the alternative to an agent was to self-manage by instinct: cobbled-together leases, informal reference checks, spreadsheets for rent. That is the gap RentBetter fills. The real product isn't software so much as confidence - the tools that let a nervous first-timer act like a professional.
The problems it removes are practical ones: how do I list on the big portals, how do I know a tenant is reliable, is my lease actually compliant in my state, how do I collect rent without chasing it, and who do I call when the hot water breaks. By packaging portal listings, tenancy-database screening, compliant leases, automated rent and a maintenance workflow, RentBetter lets an owner run a tenancy end-to-end without a management agreement.
Instead of one all-in fee, RentBetter sells the work in pieces - a direct-to-consumer SaaS model priced per property, so a landlord can pay once to find a tenant or subscribe to run the whole tenancy.
Advertise, take applications, screen tenants and create the lease. You take it from there.
A lower one-off to find the tenant, then a monthly fee to manage rent, bond, expenses and reporting.
Run and maintain an existing tenancy - payments, inspections, maintenance and documents.
Indicative residential pricing, per property; plans and figures are approximate and set by RentBetter. Additional revenue comes from marketplace add-ons and industry-partner referrals.
RentBetter sits in a crowded and fast-moving Australian proptech field. Full-service digital managers such as :Different will still do the managing for you; portfolio-focused tools like PropertyMe, Ailo and Kolmeo lean toward agencies and larger owners; and lower-cost platforms such as RentingSmart and Landlord Studio compete on price and simplicity. RentBetter's distinguishing move is breadth for the self-manager: it is positioned as one of the more comprehensive end-to-end tenancy platforms aimed squarely at owners who want to do it themselves - matched with an add-on marketplace so they are never truly on their own.
The best businesses often begin as a favour you keep doing - RentBetter started as a side hustle while its founder still worked at a bank.
From the RentBetter origin storyThere is a trade-off, and RentBetter is upfront-adjacent about it: because pricing is per property, costs can climb for landlords with large portfolios, which is where agency-oriented rivals tend to win. For the one-to-few-property owner, though, the maths that started the whole thing - keep the fee, do the work - is exactly the point.
The growth story isn't a viral moment so much as timing: as holding costs rose, "do it yourself, but properly" became a rational choice for more owners - and RentBetter had the tooling ready.
Jeremy Goldschmidt formalises a habit of sharing property tips into a self-management platform, while still working at ANZ.
The product grows beyond finding tenants to cover managing and maintaining - the Match, Manage, Maintain model.
RentBetter raises Series A capital, taking total funding to ~$3.2M, to grow the team and invest in product.
The subscriber base grows more than 250% year-on-year as landlords look to cut management fees.
Third-party estimates put revenue near $1.1M, up from ~$563K a year earlier.
Before RentBetter, Goldschmidt worked in strategy and management consulting - Boston Consulting Group, Capgemini, IBM and ANZ among the stops. He is himself a self-managing property owner, which is less a biographical footnote than the entire thesis: RentBetter is the product he wished existed when he first became a landlord. He ran it as a side hustle before committing to it full-time, an unglamorous path that suits a company whose real work is making an anxious owner feel capable.
A partnership giving RentBetter landlords access to building and property inspection services, helping them manage well and save on management fees.
Listing distribution so self-managing owners can advertise on Australia's two major property portals.
Tenant background and tenancy-history checks (via TICA) built into the application flow.