efRENTier Archive

efRENTier is a service that offers P2P (peer-to-peer) rentals. But not the kind of rentals you might be thinking of. These are real-world rentals of tools, movies, music, laptops, mattresses, fishing rods, chairs, etc. They are attempting to create the rentals version of Craigslist.

Founder Santosh Rangarajan explained his reasoning for creating the service, "I realized I have so much stuff at my home which i use only once or twice and other times it lay unused. I figured I could make some money of it by renting it  At same time there are others who need stuff for small time and why waste money in buying it. Besides at this time concept of renting is restricted to big stores like Home depot, Rent A Center, Corts etc., but i thought it would be nice if people can rent from  other people. It might even end up cheaper. 

You can search for items in your local area or by university. For example, someone in Atlanta is looking to rent their mattress.  When you register your item to rent, you select the deposit a person must leave with efRENTier while the item is in the borrower’s possession. This type of app will need a large amount of legal terms as people will forget to return the items and then the deposit would be forfeited. The better solution is to make the deposit equal to the current price of the item set by efRENTier to put more pressure on the borrower to return the item.

The site is in Alpha currently and is built in Ruby on Rails and uses Google Maps heavily. The site needs a lot of polishing and cleaning but is a good start. Would you rent items from others in your neighborhood?