Rentberry's rental auction site expands in US

I think the reporting is misleading: 'How would you feel if, desperate for somewhere to live, you had to bid against other prospective renters?'

That's just the market. All this does is make it more transparent.

What is needed is strong legal protections as part of the bidding process, so that neither landlord nor renter can be unexpectedly left in the lurch at the last minute, and a digital approach could plausibly help here.

I live in London. A friend of mine recently was told two days before moving into a rental flat that the landlord had had accepted a better offer. A deposit had been taken by the estate agent, and they were meant to have handled getting the landlord to sign a contract, but it turned out they hadn't. In the end it was all resolved, with the friend having to up their bid, but it was by no means guaranteed.

For him, the ability to bid at the last minute on a flat could have been valuable, and so would contractually binding documents that could have resulted from the successful conclusion of an auction.

A site like this does not get off the ground in the U.K. without the cooperation of the letting agencies. The primary web-site for finding rentals in London is rightmove.co.uk and zoopla which are both owned by the letting agencies.

Of course they want tenants to bid against each other to try to extract the maximum price for properties.

I think this is brilliant. I will take a transparent and open bidding process over the "show up to an open house with 20 other people and pray to god the landlord likes you" approach any day.