Executive Summary

Apartment hunting is a hassle. Newspaper listings don’t give enough information, apartment guide magazines are always out of date, and driving around town looking for “For Rent” signs is a waste of time and gas. Apartment search engines aim to make finding a new apartment easier by showing listings from multiple sites in a single easy-to-ready format. However, this still does not help customers who are pressed for time, and money.  Many rental websites are also hard to follow, have outdated postings, and many inaccurate results.

RentSimple offers college students and young professionals a comprehensive online resource for apartment hunting, that is easy-to-use, always updated, and provides customized results. Our website presents customers with a user-friendly format, that is rich with content. With RentSimple, thousands of unique visitors can search for single-family houses, apartments and condos that are perfect for them. Users can customize their search by narrowing their selection based on many factors such as specific area, distance to schools and amenities. Renters can refine their search by a detailed list of amenities, such as property features (air conditioning, fireplace, etc) and pet policy. By utilizing an unique algorithm developed by our programmers, we also aim to provide customers with the most suitable housing for them. With RentSimple, customers will no longer have to trouble themselves finding housing, leaving them with more free time to do the things they enjoy.

Our initial target market is undergraduates and graduate students in the Pittsburgh area, mainly students from Carnegie Mellon University, University of Pittsburgh and Chatham University. The service areas we hope to cover are Oakland, Shadyside and Squirrel Hill. Market research has shown us that these areas are the most highly sought after by college students living in the surrounding area. Along with this information we learned that interest in RentSimple among students and young professionals is very high. At least 30% show “interest” in our service, with 10% showing “strong interest”. Currently the number of students in the area is 43,021 and the targeted market size (off-campus residents) is approximately 10,0001. Since not many websites are aggressively advertising their website, our active marketing strategy and student-friendly format will help us to gain 10% of market share in the first year, 20% by the end of second year and 25% by the third year. We will employ social active marketing, given students’ higher use of digital media when finding information. For example, we will create a facebook fan page, where photos, videos and surveys of topics that students are interested and hold events to build a fan base.   

We plan to launch our website in January of 2013. During the first month, we will invite 100 students to try our website and give us feedbacks to improve features of our website. Reflecting opinions of the focus group, we will make some changes and make the website available to everyone by the end of February. With the support of this user base, the RentSimpe team hopes to extend our services beyond the Pittsburgh area, and begin opening services for other major college areas. By the end of year x, we hope to have expanded within the local Pittsburgh area, as well as beginning services in

Philadelphia. With the extension to Philadelphia we will be able to tap into a student market of more than 100,000. We assume that the Philadelphia area will have the same demand as the Pittsburgh area. This expansion will allow us to quickly grow our services, and be a very sustainable venture for the future.

For property owner, managers and professional realtors, Rentsimple is a powerful business tool that increases rental responses and delivers accurate reporting and tracking for proven results. Rentsimple offers a variety of marketing products to enable cost effective property marketing Our standard design service that provides a template design with graphic art services will make the website convert visitors to renters through optimizing the design of the community website. We also perform real-time property content and information management to result lead tracking and lead response. Eventually, we intend for RentSimple to be acquired by a large realtor firm.

In order to develop business and accelerate growth, RentSimple is looking to secure funding via an equity placement to establish a high market share and generate profits. The company is seeking $xxxxx in Capital Assets Kirkpatrick for xx% equity ownership. Financings will be used as follows: Payroll $xxxxx, Marketing and Strategiec Alliances $xxxxx and Equipments and Rents $xxxxx. After this initial funding round, the service is expected to grow without any additional rounds of investment. The RentSimple team hopes that Capital Assets Kirkpatrick will support us in our venture and thank them for their consideration. We sincerely hope that we will be able to continue this prosperous partnership, as we hope to provide RentSimple to thousands of users.