Present you is happier to only pay $40/month rather than $500-600 up front.
The hassle of selling used furniture should not be taken lightly, both in it's complexity and its sale price. Items on Craigslist, sold 12 months after purchase, go for 15-20% of retail value.
I've moved from SF Bay to LA, moved back to SF, moved back to LA (probably going to move back to SF again). Within SF Bay and LA moved a couple times as well.
Re differentiators: reasonable question, for sure. Check my reply to Charia above.
Re established market: interestingly, Cort and most other rental cos don't have a very good hold on the direct to consumer rental market. They are primarily focused on B2B rentals. Their brands and experiences are under the weather and don't appeal to our target market of younger people who move a lot. There's a new breed of successful companies cropping up that simply refresh the experience and tailor it to the way people live and interact today.
Not much more. If the apartment is way up a walkup and we're carrying 4 dressers, 4 tables, 4 armoires, etc, we'll generally change the $99 delivery fee to $149.
Re damage: if you break something, we charge the cost of fixing the item. Since it's different for each item (ie. a small cut in the sofa vs reupholstering an entire sofa that had a bottle of wine spilled on it), it's difficult for us to explicitly state how much it would cost us for each type of damage. But we could certainly try.
We see ourselves as competing more with "ownership" than anything else. To us, ownership of furniture (i.e. responsibility for big ticket items that tie you down) is the problem.
Our competitive advantage to financing options is just that: we remove ownership from the equation while still giving you the ability to pay monthly rather than a large lump sum.
The ~$100/month price is our 3 month price. So total cost to you to have either of those sofas is $300 vs the cost to buy them retail at $600, which excludes assembly.
Fire sales are easier said than done. Takes time to get real replies via craigslist, and often times you might forget to sell the item till days before you're moving, adding to the headache.
Granted in a 3 month scenario, the total out of pocket cost is $300 but it's a bit disingenuous to directly compare that to the $600 cost of the couch.
No matter how you look at it, the renting option will be more expensive. Just own it and don't try to defend it or make it sound less than it is using shaky comparisons. Doing so just makes you sound shadier than necessary.
Yes, rent-to-buy is something we recently starting working on. Many people have asked about this, and we agree it makes a LOT of sense for our customers to have that option at any point during their rental.
We'll have more info on our site in the coming weeks, but until then, we'll gladly discuss details directly with you if you like.
Great point here. It's a bit counter intuitive, right, that Americans on the whole are moving less. To add some color:
-The majority of Americans that live in rural or somewhat suburban areas are most certainly (though anecdotally) bringing this number down. In cities, you'd expect this number to be much higher than 10%.
-This data point from article below is bit more telling of our target market. Please don't mind their incessant use of the term "millennials" - they know not what they do.
1. Does your market analysis differentiate between intra-city and inter-city move? It feels like the service is much more valuable for people moving inter-city.
2. Is there a better source for the "planned future mobility" data? I would expect rent.com to have a strong editorial bias around the perception that the rental market is healthy and renters are competing with each other. I would not expect the same kind of bias in census data.
3. I would love to see the census data's mobility over time cohorted by age group. Is that something you guys have done, and can share?
Yeah, it's kind of gross really. These guys prey on the inability of certain income-classes to get credit, obtain loans, etc. Rent-a-Center is the same way :(
The hassle of selling used furniture should not be taken lightly, both in it's complexity and its sale price. Items on Craigslist, sold 12 months after purchase, go for 15-20% of retail value.