Need Rent Values? Get On the RentOMeter.com!

Ok RentOMeter.com rules and is a perfect example of the power of a Internet mash-up. At it's heart RentOMeter is a data aggregator. It collects data from many sources and presents it in a way the average human can digest, even Real Estate agents.

The RentOMeter works by collecting (aggregating) for rent ads from "publicly available sources on the internet and in print" further "The Rentometer never uses private data from any source". I suspect the data comes from Internet sites such as CraigList, ForRent.com, Oodle.com, etc. One of the goals of using live public data is relevance. The data is current. It's a snapshot of current rental ads, not some old report of rental rates collected by interviewing landlords.

As a aggregator collects data, they in turn become a source of NEW data. They identify trends, correlations, and patterns in the data. And these patterns become valuable too. And RentOMeter is already doing that. For each look-up they provide a local rental price gage. The price gage is like a speedometer on your car. Your subject property rent is pegged next to low, average, and high rents. So RentOMeter collects rent data about price values by area and property types from rental ads. That data is not in any individual ad, but when thousands of ads are aggregated together the trends can be identified. Cool.

As another example would it be beneficial for a Investor to know rents have dropped 10% in the neighborhood she is buying in? Yeah that's valuable.

RentOMeter service is FREE. They make money through a property management service called "iiProperty" via monthly subscriptions. Also they collect some revenues through arrangements with large classified sites who charge for their own listings. I have tried iiProperty. It's great for a landload/property manager who has over 10 doors or who wants to move her business to the web.

RentOMeter's closest competitor is Zilpy.com. I like them too. I like Zilpy because it provides more data such as actual competing property details like address, bedrooms, etc. Check back soon for a more in-depth look at Zilpy.com.