Rent.com.au Reports Strong Revenue Growth for FY21

Rent.com.au, Australia’s market-leading rental listings marketplace, has reported revenue growth of 26% in its latest financial report to shareholders for the financial year ending June 30, 2021.

The report, released today to the Australian Securities Exchange, showed the company recorded a net operating loss after tax of A$1,294,013 (US$970,703) compared with an operating loss after tax of A$1,665,215 (US$1,249,160) during the previous year.

In May 2021 the platform debuted a Beta version of RentPay, a digital wallet that allows its users to manage their monthly rental payments.

RentPay started out as a concept in the hands of accounting software firm AYOB before being bought by Rent in 2018. The development of the product started in earnest in early 2020 before being halted due to pandemic induced complications. Since then Rent has signed a deal with digital payments firm Novatti Group and raised fresh cash to help the development of RentPay with today's announcement seeing all the work come to fruition.

The new development incurred an EBITDA loss of A$806,524 (US$605,013) due to development costs however, the report also stated how the company’s apps are continuing to achieve higher customer ratings than other leading real estate apps.

The statement also reported how advertising and sales grew by 28% following a focus on driving repeat business. It said that more than 50% of the company’s advertising campaigns ran for six months or longer. Advertising and sales revenue was reported as A$1,263,450 (US$947,776).

Net assets of the Group also showed substantial improvement, increasing from A$1,795,125 (US$1,346,680) to A$4,910,847 (US$3,683,871). Cash reserves had also increased - to A$2,918,306 (US$2,189,166) compared with A$631,771 (US$478,423) at June 30, 2020.

Greg Bader, CEO of Rent.com.au, said: “We have made improvements to our onboarding process flow, with additional security measures implemented, and have also released a web version of RentPay enabling renters to sign up rapidly and get started seamlessly on which ever device they prefer. With these changes implemented, we’ve commenced marketing to our database, with early results being encouraging.”

Discussing forthcoming likely developments, the company reported: “The Group is currently optimising the RentPay rental payments platform prior to a full market launch. The Group’s addressable market in Australia is estimated at more than 2.5 million rental households which, in the director’s opinion, provides ample scope for further commercialisation of the Group’s products, and for the Group to achieve profitability.”