About Rentbench
There is an information gap between tenants and letting agents. Agents see rents across their entire portfolio. They have access to agreed rents through closed commercial exchanges, as well as various benchmarking indexes and intelligence tools. A renter sees a handful of listings and often doesn’t know if an asking price reflects reality or simply tests their limits.
The Renters’ Rights Act ban on rental bidding made pricing more opaque: forced to name their ceiling upfront, landlords and agents overprice their listings, increasing the gap between asking and agreed rents.
Renters currently don’t have a good source for what similar properties nearby rent for — only what they’re asked to pay. This makes it difficult to know whether an asking price is in line with the market, whether a renewal increase is reasonable, or how to negotiate from a position of knowledge rather than guesswork.
As two software engineers living and renting in London, we know this from our own experience. It’s hard to negotiate unless you know the market. But for us, tenants, the market is often opaque. Rentbench is our attempt to change this. We aggregate rents submitted by tenants alongside data from public sources like ONS and tribunals. We want other tenants to have this information in front of them.
With enough people contributing, we can make the market a bit more transparent and negotiating easier.
Have a question or an idea? Email us at team@rentbench.fyi.