Totira
The Better Way To Rent. For Everyone. Guaranteed.
THE CHALLENGE
The home and apartment rental process is riddled with risk, inefficiency, and bias – for both tenants and landlords. Renters have to constantly monitor clunky listing platforms, repeatedly submit applications, and bend their schedule for showings – all while trying not to get scammed. Landlords are burdened with making the weighty decision of who they can actually trust to rent their unit, based on limited information about applicants that’s rooted in financials more so than character.
Totira is reinventing how everyone rents with a curated marketplace that fosters seamless property discovery and rental. By creating one verified profile, renters can submit to multiple opportunities and feel confident that they are being represented by more than just their credit score. Landlords can easily review applications, as well as be vetted by tenants for character and to ensure their listings are verified for accuracy. The Totira way ensures authenticity and peace of mind for both sides.
The team engaged 5&Vine to define Ideal Customer Profiles for both landlords and tenants to inform their brand positioning, value proposition, brand narrative, and messaging hierarchy. The founders had many great insights and ideas about the positive impact that Totira would make to overhaul the status quo of renting as we know it today, and needed a trusted partner to articulate their thinking into a concise framework that would easily allow them to pitch the company and give clear direction to collaborators to build their platform.
OUR APPROACH
To ground our work in empathy, we mapped the experience that both landlords and tenants take to list or rent an apartment or home. We noted the current ways of accomplishing the steps of their respective journeys, with an eye for pain points experienced universally vs. pain points that are amplified for certain groups of people, mainly newcomers without an established credit history in Canada along with others groups – minorities, religions, and genders – that often bear the most discrimination in the rental process. From this foundation we developed ICPs that speaks to real experience and set the stage for our Challenger Strategy and brand narrative development.
We reflected on the pain points to articulate brand-wide vs. landlord-facing and tenant-facing messaging hierarchies that encapsulated their key messages. We defined a concise elevator pitch for the founders to win buy-in from stakeholders and collaborators as they build the platform.
THE OUTCOME
We delivered clear and compelling ICPs for landlords and tenants that built on an empathetic understanding of their rental experience. We also developed a concrete elevator pitch and brand narrative to share how with Totira, tenants are more than just their credit score, allowing us to match pre-qualified applicants with vetted landlords. That’s how Totira guarantees on-time rent payments and total property satisfaction.