‘Rentometer’ creates a buzz:<br> <i>Providence techie’s Web tool draws major media attention</i>

A Web service designed to instantly provide the average rent for any size apartment in any real estate market in the country has garnered nationwide attention for the startup technology company that created it.
Investment Instruments Corp., a Newton, Mass.-based company co-founded by Providence resident Owen Johnson that is bringing real estate management tools to the Web, launched the free Rentometer Web service in October.
Visitors to the Rentometer.com Web site can compare their rents to apartments of the same size in their area, after providing their own address, number of bedrooms, monthly rent and the number of units in the building.
In addition to showing visitors the median rent in their area for an apartment their size, Rentometer mashes up national rental data with Google Maps, enabling users to see what other landlords in their neighborhood are charging on a block-by-block basis.
Investment Instruments created Rentometer in large part to build buzz about its other services, which include iiProperty, a Web-based property management service launched in March that enables landlords to track leases, rental payments and invoices for their properties, Johnston said.
“The Rentometer was designed to attract a lot of attention and to provide a valuable service,” he said.
The tactic worked. Rentometer was immediately embraced by a handful of influential technology blogs, leading to a spate of attention in the mainstream media. The phenomenon was an example of how tech-savvy companies can harness the “viral” power of the Internet to dramatically raise awareness of their products.
After Rentometer’s technology was lauded in the blogs O’Reilly Radar, Digg and LifeHacker, the Web site received more than 100,000 visits from landlords and renters in a single day, Johnson said. Ultimately, PC Magazine named Rentometer its site of the week, and Rentometer received mention on Fox News, MSNBC, and ABC News, and in the magazines Wired and Reason.
USA Today published a review of the Web site in its technology section that read in part, “Ease your mind, curse your overpriced neighborhood, or wonder when your landlord got into the extortion business with the super-useful Rentometer.”
The Web site compiles its rental data from active property listings on the Internet, and it provides a comparative market analysis for rental properties in any market with the use of a closely held algorithm, Johnson said.
Increasingly, rental data is also pushed in bulk into the Rentometer map by individual landlords who own thousands of apartments, or the companies that market those apartments, he said.
“They’re interested in having their data in the system and potentially generating leads for their apartments,” Johnson said.
Aside from Johnson, Investment Instruments currently employs two other partners, a team of contractors and some part-time staff. The firm is working to extend the services of iiProperty and Rentometer and to build new online products for landlords, tenants, property manager, real estate investors and other real estate professionals, Johnson said.