Rent.com.au Sees Steady Growth of Transactional RentPay Product in Q2

The publicly listed Australian rentals portal operator Rent.com.au has revealed that it saw steady growth in its key transactional RentPay business in the second quarter of the financial year.

Rent owns and operates the eponymous Rent.com.au portal which competes with the likes of Realestate.com.au and Domain in the Australian market.

The portal business saw revenues drop slightly year over year. A company statement noted that the drop was partly due to the impact of revenue from a one-off partnership during the comparison period.

Over the last few years though, Rent's focus has been on the growth of its RentPay service that lets tenants pay their rent via an app while enabling them to build a reliability scoring and a 'buffer' amount to protect landlords. Since launching in 2021—after the input of significant resources and investment—RentPay has added nearly 11,000 active customers with the company saying that the onboarding of two key new contracts of around 2,000 renters each is ongoing.

Quarterly incomings from RentPay still only represent around a quarter of overall company revenue but in a missive to the Australian Stock Exchange Rent was bullish about the future impact of the product.

"The benefits of the RentPay model are becoming increasingly apparent with each passing quarter. Although we delayed the onboarding of two large rent rolls until January 2025, which meant we didn't increase active customers by as much as the previous quarter, we still set a new quarterly record of A$59.2 million in payments made via RentPay, driving a 65% year-on-year growth in recurrent revenue."

In early December 2024 the company announced that longtime CEO, Greg Bader and Chairman Garry Garside would step down. Rent confirmed in its Q2 report that as of the 1st of January, new CEO Jan Ferreira has effectively taken control of the company with Bader now in an advisory role until May 2025.