Rentfacts.io
Building a rental transparency app that tells tenants the truth before signing a lease
Design and build a SaaS platform to help tenants uncover truths about prospective rentals and landlords, and to give landlords an opportunity to build trust with prospective tenants.
Renters sign leases with almost no reliable information about a unit or a landlord. Rentfacts surfaces real, user-generated signal (reviews and reported issues) before someone signs, and gives landlords a reputational reason to take accountability.
Problem: know before you sign
The hard part is the two-sided cold start: the product is only useful once it has content, and content only comes once people trust it enough to contribute.
The pivot: gated → open contribution
The original model gated review-writing behind identity verification. It was the “right” answer for trust, but for a product whose whole problem is a cold start, the gate throttled the one thing that matters most: contribution. I flipped it - any signed-in user can write a review; it lands pending and only publishes after an admin approves it. Moderation moved from the front door to the back.
The shipped product
Search-first home, “Know before you sign”
The landing page leads with the promise and a single address search with live autocomplete. A trust note sits right beside it, putting the moderation promise at the point of entry, not buried in a policy page.
The contribution flow: turning a blank address into signal
Search an address no one has covered yet and the page doesn't dead-end — it lazy-materializes the listing and invites the first review.
From there a five-step wizard paces the tenant through overall experience, the best/worst split, property-quality and management ratings, then a final review-before-submit.
Listing detail
A property page pairs a neighbourhood map with a property-overview panel and a review summary card. Individual reviews break out per-dimension ratings, and a maintenance snapshot surfaces open/closed issues. Scannable, comparable signal, not a wall of prose.
Outcomes
A password-walled Vercel preview is the next milestone. The PostHog funnel is already wired and waiting on live traffic, so the metric that decides the concept: do visitors become contributors? Measurable the day visitors arrive.
“Earn trust through moderation now; layer verification back as a trust upgrade later, not an entry tax.”