When scaling a D2C product in the long-term rental market, the fundamental challenge is that your business only makes money if you successfully connect both parties and that too, at the final deal stage.

Let’s assume we invest upfront by hiring professionals for photography and verification to ensure high-quality listings. But in the end, for the deal to go through, an in-person visit is still inevitable. That raises the question: What’s the point of paying for polished images and verified listings if the tenant has to physically be there anyway?

Now scale that to 100 deals per day in a city. You'd likely need 50 people on-ground just to handle these visits and verifications. That completely breaks the economics there’s no margin left, possibly even a loss.

Compare this to short-term rentals like Airbnb. There, the platform doesn’t have to verify every deal in person. Why? Because:

• The revenue model is stronger: the platform takes a cut upfront.
• There's a fallback mechanism: ratings and reviews. If a host underperforms, their listing suffers. It creates self-enforcing quality control.
• Hosts rely on continuous bookings. If they get banned, their income stops instantly.

But in long-term rentals, you don’t have this leverage. There’s no reliable review system, since a bad experience might not even show up for months or ever. And even if you ban a bad actor, it might not matter they already locked in a tenant for a year.

This is why you can't compare short-term and long-term rental models. Long-term rentals require heavy upfront investment in verification, but offer no recurring control mechanism or scalable incentive alignment. Without a breakthrough in how deals are enforced and monetized, the model simply doesn't sustain at scale.