Rent.com.au Sees Resilient Revenue Despite Australian Rental Market Challenges

The ASX-listed rentals portal company Rent.com.au has released an update to the market on its activities for the first quarter of the Australian financial year. Highlights of the Western Australia-based firm's operations during the three months ended September 30th include:

• Quarterly revenue stood at A$786k, 5% less than the comparison period.
• The number of RentPay customers increased by 17% on a quarterly sequential basis.
• Advertising revenue was up 16% on a quarterly sequential basis.

Rent.com.au is a specialist rental portal company that competes with the likes of REA Group-owned Realestate.com.au and Domain.

In addition to its core portal business, Rent.com.au has several other consumer-facing convenience products including its RentPay product which lets tenants pay their rent via an app while enabling them to build a reliability scoring and a 'buffer' amount to protect landlords.

Like other Australian real estate portal operators, Rent.com.au has been suffering from a soft housing market of late and has seen the performance of its main portal-based advertising revenues drop significantly over the last 12 months.

"The efforts put in by our team over both this and previous quarters has both parts of our business growing. We continue to deliver good RentPay quarterly customer growth, both from the strong demand from real estate agents and from consumers despite consumer marketing being scaled back a little from Q4 FY23. We've had a strong start to the December 2023 quarter too, already reaching more than 7,500 active customers by the end of October," said Rent.com.au CEO, Mr Greg Bader

"On the "Search portal' side of the business, revenue again grew over the previous quarter. This was mainly driven by ongoing improvement in Advertising Sales and our RentBond referral programme to which we added further partners during the quarter. The revenue growth has driven an improvement in EBITDA and the 'Search' portal returned to positive EBITDA."

In a subsequent announcement to shareholders on Thursday, Rent announced that it was seeking to raise A$1.95 million via an entitlements issue. The raise is being led by Australian tech entrepreneur Bevan Slattery who has agreed to sub-underwrite A$650k.

The primary goal of the capital injection is to fund the marketing of the company's RentPay product and take advantage of recent momentum and a good pipeline.