New lettings portal to target flat-sharers

A recruitment company with no experience whatsoever in property has set up what it calls a nationwide UK lettings portal which it claims will soon roll out to India, the US, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.

The portal, www.rentorlet.com, is effectively an online lettings service with specific categories for rooms, houses, apartments and other miscellaneous properties. It is looking for properties to display from letting agents or directly from live-in and live-out landlords and from flat-dwellers seeking new sharers.

It is free to list in the site's 'standard' section for seven days but there are two premium' options, allowing greater promotion and additional details, costing £2.99 and £3.99 for 30 days' listing.

The new site's parent company, Quality Manpower Solutions, already operates two other websites wholly unrelated to property - ContractorDaily.com and ITContractorsUK.com.

Company spokesman Smit Shah told Letting Agent Today that the firm had researched a range of online property sites from www.spareroom.co.uk to Gumtree and believed the lettings sector was growing sufficiently quickly to allow another online service to operate.

In the next two or three months we are introducing something completely new. If you are looking for, say, a flat in London and someone else is looking for a flat in London, we'll put you in touch. Arranging flat-sharing like this will be a major part of our service and partnering people like this will be a unique service we'll offer for free says Shah.

However, when Letting Agent Today checked on the portal last evening it had not got off to a flying start - only 15 properties were listed to rent.