Launching The Rentals Token

This week we have launched The Rentals Token. A Tokensale process that with all great team involved we have finished in 4 months. Average time is about 1 year. We have been able to do that thanks to the team: Joca, Fran, Juan Ignacio, all the team & Board in LaComunity (F.Soler, Jaime, Vicens, Diego, Adri, Alvaro, Toro, Toni, Nati, Smara, Judith...), Marketpay, RCD Legal, Roman y Asociados, Sergio, Jose, and much more. So happy for all of us.

I leave you with our first post in Medium:

Hello decentralized world!

The Rentals Network is a major disruptor in the vacation rentals and home sharing market, reducing costs for the customer and increasing efficiency for distributors.

The vacation rentals sector started with vacation apartments being distributed to customers through travel agencies, in a physical location with sales agents. Barcelona saw the birth of urban rentals in 2000, long before the appearance of Airbnb. The model evolved into a complicated supply chain with many brokers and distributors. Airbnb disrupted the market with an online service which enabled property managers (the owner, or the person or company in charge of the apartment) to publish the details and conditions of the apartment online and to receive bookings through a centralized website, all in a single closed and proprietary platform.

A large part of the vacation rentals and home sharing market currently goes through Airbnb, or through a complicated supply chain, in which property owners distribute their rental properties through various layered rental brokers. Those layers of brokers expose APIs for third party distributors to connect and download the list of properties and the business rules associated with them (discounts, availability, minimum stay, etc.) and publishing the properties on their specific websites where the customer will place their bookings, resulting in big inefficiencies in terms of real-time prices and availability.

This API-based supply chain becomes a complicated and inefficient model, in which each player invests time and resources to communicate with several APIs and the property manager/owner loses control of their property (pricing, discounts, availability, etc.). In this model disputes are very expensive and difficult to solve, as with any supply chain, with segregated data silos in each company participating in the process.

On the other hand, the Airbnb model, which is more simple but never a pure P2P model, only reaches a certain part of the market (Airbnb users) and is completely centralized, closed and proprietary. Airbnb imposes high fees and its own rules, and all other actors lose all control.

The Rentals Network is a token and a DApp with a set of decentralized protocols in addition to ethereum smart contracts, creating a decentralized open marketplace for any player as a model to disrupt the inefficient rentals supply chain, without the risks associated with closed, centralized and proprietary services such as Airbnb. The Rentals Token (TRT) is the ERC-20 smart utility token exchanged in the network, facilitating payments, escrow, reputation and arbitration.

LaComunity, as an advanced player in the vacation rentals and home sharing market with more than 120,000 properties in distribution, is in a privileged position to promote and lead the decentralization of the vacation rentals market. The Rentals Network and the TRT token will be developed by LaComunity, as a private company.