Beware the Tech Bro Bearing a Rental App

I read with interest about yet another tech bro promising to improve our lives with an app.

Jeremy Goldschmidt has developed RentBetter, and the name alone makes me suspicious.

Because every renter knows there is no silver lining when it comes to renting in Australia.

But I digress. RentBetter isn’t really designed to make life better for renters. In any real or imagined context, that would be an oxymoron. The app, of course, was created to make life easier for landlords, allowing property investors to find tenants, manage expenses and organise repairs online, all without using a real estate agent.

To be fair, Goldschmidt has at least identified one important truth: renters aren’t the only people who don’t want to deal with real estate agents. Apparently, landlords don’t either.

Among Goldschmidt’s further brilliant revelations is that real estate agents don’t particularly like renters, or rentals. Who knew? He described property management as an “unloved part of the industry”, adding: “I think if you spoke to real estate agents, a lot of them would say that the value of the rental book is often to produce leads for the sale.”

Well, that explains a lot. Because every real estate agent I’ve had the displeasure of dealing with has treated me with such tremendous respect that I couldn’t wait to return, with the home-loan deposit I somehow never managed to save while paying exorbitant rent and ask them to sell me my dream home.

But wait, there’s more. Goldschmidt also claims landlords will save money by cutting out property managers, and those savings could ultimately be passed on to renters.

In the immortal words of Darryl Kerrigan: tell him he’s dreamin’.

In what alternate universe would a landlord voluntarily pass those savings on to a renter?

Besides, I’ve heard these sorts of promises from app-wielding start-up cowboys before. Sadly, this isn’t my first rodeo.

In 2014, tech entrepreneurs Chris Koch and Chad Stephens sold their online tenancy application platform, 1Form, to realestate.com.au owner REA Group for a tidy $15 million.

Speaking to SmartCompany at the time, Stephens described the now-infamous platform as their“baby” - one they had created, chest-fed and nurtured before handing it to REA to “help get it to the next level”.

Then came the obligatory start-up origin story. Yawn.

After several failed ventures left them heavily in debt, Koch and Stephens launched 1Form from their living room before making the inevitable pilgrimage to the garage.

“We had to beg, borrow and steal to make it work. We got a bank loan pretending it was for furniture. We launched it from our living room, and eventually moved to the garage before it really took off,” Stephens said.

What is it with tech founders and garages, anyway?

The more important question, however, is what became of their “baby”.

Chucky comes to mind.

Because platforms such as 1Form helped transform people desperately searching for somewhere to live into bundles of data: wages, employment histories, bank statements, identification documents, rental records and references, all fed through an impersonal digital gateway.

The process may have become faster and more convenient for agents and landlords, but convenience for the people holding the power does not necessarily translate into fairness for those seeking the basic human right to put a roof over their heads.

And now rental technology is moving even further, with platforms capable of screening, ranking and scoring applicants using criteria renters may never see or fully understand.

For a single person living on one wage, a casual worker, a solo parent, someone receiving government support or anyone whose circumstances cannot be neatly reduced to boxes on a form, this raises serious questions about fairness.

A single income, irregular employment or an imperfect rental history may tell one story on a screen and an entirely different one in real life. But there is little opportunity to explain context when your financial circumstances and rental history speak before you do.

Consider what happens when a rental payment is incorrectly recorded, or a disputed ledger is used to complete a digital rental reference.

That information can follow a tenant into their next application, potentially influencing whether they secure a home, without the prospective landlord ever seeing the bank statements, correspondence or circumstances behind it.

The renter may not even know what has been disclosed, let alone have an opportunity to challenge it.

And therein lies the problem with automating housing. Information moves quickly; context does not.

For renters already struggling in Australia's housing market, the consequences are not merely administrative. It can mean application after application, rejection after rejection, and never knowing why.

Now place that same system in the path of a woman fleeing domestic violence.

Family and domestic violence is a major reason women and children leave their homes in Australia. In 2024-25, almost 47,000 people who had experienced domestic and family violence were already homeless when they sought specialist assistance.

For them, a rental application is not simply paperwork. It may be their only safe exit.

Yet disrupted employment, a single income, temporary accommodation, gaps in rental history or financial hardship are precisely the circumstances an automated screening process may treat unfavourably without ever understanding why.

There is no box marked: “My financial history looks like this because I was trying to survive.”

When technology silently pushes these women further down the queue, the consequence is not merely another rejected application. It may leave them with nowhere safe to go, or force them back to the home they were trying to escape.

That is not innovation. It is danger disguised as efficiency.

So forgive me if I don’t immediately celebrate another app promising to “disrupt” renting or feel suitably motivated and inspired by another self-appointed digital saviour and his obligatory cool-garage start-up story.

Bro, please.

Renters have endured quite enough disruption already.

And it all begs the question: who does this technology ultimately help?

Certainly the tech bros who build the platforms, attract investors and sell their “babies” for millions. It helps property owners cut costs and allows managing agents to automate work that once required human judgment.

The landlord may save himself the cost of an agent. The agent may save itself the effort of manually processing payments. The technology company collects its fees and data.

But who carries the risk when the information is wrong?

The renter.

The person whose application may be rejected without explanation. The single parent whose disputed payment history follows them from one property to the next. The woman escaping violence whose circumstances cannot be explained by a ticked box.

By reducing people to little more than another brick in the wall, an income, an employment status and a series of unexplained entries on a screen, automated systems risk pushing the most vulnerable even further down the queue.

Technology without transparency or accountability does not fix the power imbalance in renting. It merely automates it.

Ultimately, these systems risk fuelling housing insecurity while private companies profit from access to something every person needs: a safe and secure place to live.

Housing is not a luxury product, a data-harvesting opportunity or a prize reserved for the applicant with the tidiest algorithmic profile.

It is a basic human right.

And efficiency without accuracy, fairness and humanity is simply a faster way to deny it.