This year many articles on our platform have featured merchants, offering goods in exchange for Bitcoin. Among them were many rather simple and ordinary things like burgers on the streets of London or wooden smartphone cases produced in Canada. The retailers of premium-class products have also crossed the line and entered the cryptocurrency environment by accepting the coin as a payment method for luxury vehicles (like a Lamborghini) or extraordinary mansions (placed in Las Vegas). Now, advertising of properties in New York can also be made for digital currency.
The RentHop resource has 87000 listing of property on their page. Of course, many objects belong to the same broker, but the number is still impressive. The page is open both for agents or private advertising by owners and landlords. To pay for an advertisement the customer of the service has to purchase internal values – credits. There are different packages from 15 credits (6$) up to 300 credits (75$). The system is more convenient for wholesale contributors, but the price is rather low, especially if You chose to pay in Bitcoin. The discount for coin users varies from 40% to 60%. The implementation is made after the regressive principle – the smaller the amount of credits, the bigger the discount.
The owner of the page is a virtual currencies activist, his name is Lawrence Zhou. He has invested in many of the currencies available on the Internet, but Bitcoin attracted his attention early this year. He even started to mine Litecoin on his own. In all the examples of the digital money he sees many common advantages – the basic principles claimed by all developers – no authority, no regulation by policy, only by logic and the protocol, independency, liberty. In case of real estate it has its own strong points, among them avoiding the necessity to obtain cashier’s check to pay the deposit on a lease by the tenants. Not to mention that the customer has to spend his or her time to go to the bank, to wait in a line and to pay a fee for his own expression of will in case of fiat money. The impossibility to withdraw a transfer also is favorable in case of property.
For the present moment the service has not yet been paid in bitcoin, but Mr. Zhou understands the reasons. He believes that the branch of real estate and property is very conservative and it is hard for new technologies to storm the market. He hopes that his initiative will be a possible positive example for other similar companies to get interested in Bitcoin. However, he has received many questions from people, who consider the use of the coin in the closest future that also is a good trend.
Speaking about RentHop, it is necessary to mention that the service has many common things with cryptocurrencies, as it is also built upon algorithms. The advertisers collect HopScore and get promoted in accordance with the value collected. The points are awarded for different important managerial aspects – fast replies to inquiries, reliability, responsibility, honesty and many other things.
As the year 2014 is named by many experts the year of Bitcoin it would be interesting to follow the success of the property platform. We wish Mr. Zhou good luck and hope to get more interesting news from him in the upcoming months!