Covid-19 became an important moment for Jonathan Kite and his team at Rent Ready.
Founded in 2016 by Kite, Ryan McMillan and Will Brugh, the Charlotte startup was successful in becoming a single-stop go-between for apartment properties in need of turnover services in the Charlotte region, as well as Raleigh-Durham and Atlanta.
"Our mission is a single purpose, which is focusing on making the make-ready process easy for apartment communities," Kite said.
When a resident vacates an apartment, the management team is required to coordinate services like professional cleaning, painting, or carpet cleaning or replacement. Kite said Rent Ready takes over coordination of those tasks and streamlines it. Currently, about 140 apartment communities in the Charlotte region use the service.
"We find, schedule and qualify those vendors so they don’t have to," he said. "Then we provide transparency back to them, so they can move in residents on time, every time."
Like many startups, however, the company was not immune to the impacts of Covid-19, and Kite knew they would have to do more to remain successful. The pandemic, he said, slowed down the move out process for residents in a number of apartment communities across the city, stalling business for Rent Ready.
That's when Kite said the team saw an opportunity to pivot. The company began providing an additional disinfecting service using electrostatic spraying and EPA-approved, hospital-grade solutions.
"We had a lot of communities asking what they could do to keep residents safer because the complexes are so population dense and highly trafficked," he said. "The spray allows for more even distribution for disinfectants at a lower cost and a much higher efficacy."
Not only is the solution being used during the apartment turn process, but Kite said apartment communities are using it to disinfect common spaces like lobbies, elevators and stairwells.
"It's a risk mitigator to these communities," he said. "As long as we exisit in a world where there isn't a Covid-19 vaccination or where most of the population isn’t vaccinated, we anticipate this being a service communities will want, and also need."
