Looking for an apartment can be a miserable experience. But it's not nearly as miserable as discovering you have a nightmare of a landlord. To help make sure Chicagoans can find the best apartments, and know a little about their landlord before signing a lease, Chicago startup RentConfident has just launched to help tenants rent smarter.
RentConfident, which launched June 1, is a website that provides a comprehensive report on a Chicago rental before you sign a lease. Combing through more than 60 open datasources such as the Cook County Assessor and Cook County Treasurer, RentConfident generates a detailed report that gives information ranging from building violations, to foreclosure history, to neighborhood crime stats, to average apartment prices for nearby properties.
"Your landlord is going to do a background check on you," said RentConfident founder Kay Cleaves. "I thought it was unfair to not be able to do that to your landlord."
There are two types of reports RentConfident can generate. One is a comparison report that analyzes up to three separate properties that's designed to help renters decide between their final choices. This report, which costs $25, gives a side-by-side comparison that details each building's history, if the apartment is listed well below the asking price of nearby units (and likely a scam), names and addresses of the building owner and proper manager, recent code violations, neighborhood crime stats, and tons of other information.
The second type of report is a deep dive into the building history and information about other buildings the landlord owns/has owned in the past. This report, which costs $65, is intended for those who have settled on an apartment but want to do one last piece of research before forking over a security deposit.
RentConfident's report takes into account only verified sources like city, county, and state records, and doesn't include user generated reviews from sources like Yelp, Cleaves said. It uses sources like Realtor.com for nearby housing prices, but won't use a site like mybuildingdoesntrecycle.com, as its database is built from users.
And as new data becomes available, like Chicago's recently launched problem landlord list, RentConfident is able to add that to its reports.
While $25 and $65 reports are pretty affordable for the average renter, Cleaves noted that the price could be a deterrent for low-income families. So the company is planning to roll out a service in the next couple of weeks with Chicago social service agencies that will allow homeless individuals or low-income victims of domestic violence to use the service for free.
"We’ve set our prices low so renters can afford us, but some people can’t afford us," she said. "And the people who can’t afford us are the people who need us the most."
Cleaves said the company is focusing on growing here in Chicago before expanding elsewhere, but she has gotten interest from markets on the West Coast like Oregon and L.A. The company plans to see how its Indiegogo campaign performs before taking the product outside of Chicago, Cleaves said.
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