It was early 2000 when I discovered that housing authorities had to determine the rent reasonableness of asking prices for participating voucher units.  In other words, they had to appraise property without training or inclination.  The average housing officer is college educated and people-oriented, not a real estate analyst.  Using every thing I took from my prior career as a commercial real estate appraiser, I set out to solve the rent reasonableness dilemma for my local housing authority.  After gathering thousands of records, it became apparent that I could never be sure that there would be enough data for my first client to have three perfect comps for every test.  It was during this time of increasing frustration that I took a statistics seminar from the Appraisal Institute and discovered that my appraisal training had prepared me to develop a method for using multiple regression to test for rent reasonableness. Within a week of taking that first seminar, I built a calculator in Excel for my hometown client.

By 2002, it was clear it was time to step it up and incorporate a full business.  Over the next few years, we researched markets and built Excel calculators as quickly as we could.  Additional statistical training allowed more sophisticated calculations and provided direction for the future. Visits to HUD regional offices exposed the novel approach of using regression analysis for rent reasonableness testing and helped define the most critical features that HUD wanted to see.  The calculators were more popular than expected, so we had to streamline our approach or become overwhelmed with the demand.  In 2004, we launched Rentellect, our Internet-based version of the calculator and centralized the process.

Today our calculator is on-line serving clients all over the country. Our researchers use our tested proprietary systems to research each client's real estate market in turn.  Our data entry workers enter the comps.  Each market is monitored by our analysts to see how the calculations are reflecting the latest data collected.  Forty thousand buildings and counting are in the system.

When clients call, they talk to me.  How can I do that?  How can the owner of a growing company provide the client service for all of the clients?  I may not always be able to, but so far, our system works well, so there just aren't that many service requests despite the fact that I have 500 registered individual users in the system. I like to stay on top of my client's concerns so their needs can be solved immediately.  Those needs also drive our future plans and development of Rentellect.  My clients say it is like having someone on staff who is the resident rent reasonableness expert.

So call me for a customized quote or send me your formal RFP for rent reasonableness services.

Sincerely,
Regina Geissler, CEO
1.888.663.8495