In today’s episode of the “Start-up of the Week,” International Finance will talk about Pandaloc, a “two-sided marketplace connecting tenants with landlords,” which has established itself within Europe’s proptech ecosystem as a marketplace that allows owners to review applications, filter tenants and receive rent payments.
Pandaloc’s function is simple: allowing landlords to post and manage one residential unit for free. After that, it charges a fixed price for each additional unit. Whereas, tenants get charged a fixed percentage of their rent payment.
The venture, established in 2020, has established an innovative concept of rental relationships between individuals, as through the proptech platform, house owners contact tenants directly. Our copy today will talk about this in detail.
How Pandaloc Works?
“We believe in a world where younger generations will have good housing services. Housing is the most intimate space and rent is the No. 1 expense. However, real estate rental is broken today. Pandaloc gives the key to a good rental thanks to an innovative concept: on Pandaloc, it is the owners who contact the tenants,” the venture said.
Pandaloc’s unique rental relationship works in this way: The tenant defines his/her ideal accommodation: city, surface area, and budget, apart from describing the tenant profile details such as monthly/yearly incomes. After that, Pandaloc sends the profile to the owners of the accommodations that match the tenant’s preferences. House owners then select the tenant’s profile and contact the person directly.
Owners receive the tenant’s profile with the latter’s crucial information like financial health and guarantor details etc. Each application gets scored according to the adequacy of the Tenant’s budget to allow landlords to quickly target the profiles.
“Owners are rigorously moderated by automatic and human checks. No more wasting your time contacting dozens of owners with no response. You describe your profile once and for all. Pandaloc sends your profile to the owners and they contact you,” Pandaloc stated further.
Pandaloc is a paid service (24.99 euros) for tenants. If the tenants feel that they have not received good contacts, Pandaloc follows a simple policy: Unhappy customers will get refunded. The start-up also offers premium fees to tenants who need the service.
Pandaloc leadership sees the real estate rental experience, especially in France, as a “broken” one, apart from being anachronistic, slow and stressful, where tenants rarely get answers to their requests, send their documents and money to complete strangers, sometimes scammers, and spend a third of their budget on poor service.
Pandaloc’s mission is to change the way people rent out their housing spaces, apart from making the whole rental experience smoother, faster and more secure.
“By making this vision a reality, we give everyone the opportunity to live better, from one new beginning to the next. Faithful to our vision that the rise of rental among new generations will revolutionise rental management, and eager to professionalise landlords so that they become the superheroes of history, we created Pandaloc in 2020. Today, thousands of owners and renters trust Pandaloc for a transparent, fast and secure rental experience,” the start-up continued further.
Pandaloc works on four operational pillars: Simplicity, Prompt Client Service (be it responding to every email promptly or reimbursing unsatisfied customers), Security (Ensuring apartment owners validate their telephone numbers, human moderation of ads, using technology to instantly detect signals of suspicious activity and hosting user data on France-based servers) and Transparency.
Pandaloc is a member of the Wilco Accelerator Programme, the largest start-up accelerator in France and a major player in the Paris region’s innovation ecosystem. Wilco is supported by major institutional partners such as the Ile-de-France Region, the Public Investment Bank, the European Union, and large partner companies such as Bouygues Télécom, BNP Paribas, EDF, etc.
How Pandaloc Helps Tenants?
The answer is simple: By scoring each application, saves everyone time. The “Pandaloc Score” is a score that evaluates each tenant’s application from 1 to 100. The mechanism allows owners to more quickly contact tenants whose financial profile is compatible with the rent of their accommodation.
For calculating the score, Pandaloc takes into consideration factors like the adequacy between the tenants’ budget and the rent of the accommodation, along with the stability of the tenants’ situation and details about the guarantors.
The score is a variable one, as explained by the start-up, “A tenant can have a good score for one accommodation (good budget/tenant ratio) and a bad score for another accommodation (bad budget/rent ratio).”
All a tenant needs to do is to create a “Free Account,” where he/she can create the rental file and browse the site to test the file. Pandaloc’s “Premium Account” comes at 24.99 euros per month, availing which the tenant’s profile gets automatically sent to the owners of accommodations matching the search.
Similarly, the landlords/landladies can create their Pandaloc accounts, add listings, and respond to tenants for free. Owners can also indicate the desired rent for their accommodation via the ad page.
Free Rental Management Software
Pandaloc claims to create the best free rental management software, ensuring a smooth rental experience for landlords/landladies and their tenants while securing a stable rental income.
The process is simple here: the landlords/landladies describe their accommodation details like location, surface area, key amenities provided etc., following which Pandaloc presents to them the list of tenants who are looking for accommodations. Finally, the landlord/landlady studies the tenant profiles and makes contact directly by phone/email.
And the best part of the whole process is that Pandaloc updates the tenant lists in real time, apart from notifying the landlord/landlady by email about the new tenants to be discovered. Each tenant comes with a complete profile with their basic information and Pandaloc’s credit score. Basically, the credit score here is the “Pandaloc Score,” which evaluates each tenant’s application from 1 to 100. The score only allows property owners to more quickly contact tenants whose financial profile is compatible with the rent of their accommodation.
As stated before, the entire online rental management software doesn’t hurt the landlords/landladies financially.