No Uber for Rentals - Why There Are No Rental Marketplaces and Aggregators?

‍Karri: Hello and welcome to the Recommerce Podcast, the podcast where we talk all things Recommerce and circular businesses. This week, like every other week so far, I’m joined by Tuomo Laine, the CEO and co-founder of TwiceCommerce. Welcome.

Tuomo: Thank you again.

Karri: This week we are diving deep into the world of aggregators and we want to talk about why there are no aggregators for equipment rental businesses. So I think everybody is quite familiar with a lot of platforms that are controlling and owning the demand on their specific fields. A couple examples are, for example, Uber for car rides and Airbnb for short-term rentals. But is this actually the case that there are no aggregators or are there just not any successful ones? So Tuomo, are there any rental aggregators in the space?

Tuomo: Yeah, so if we look into equipment rentals, there are, of course, aggregators. I think in most product categories there always is some aggregator. I think the question is then that is there a dominant player that would dominate across national borders or would be kind of operating both in North America and Europe and kind of running equipment rentals. So there I think the answer is that there isn’t a clear dominant aggregator that would be controlling the demand and the market. So I think there are a few reasons for that. If we think about just rentals from an operational perspective, they are a bit harder maybe to scale. So the supply side can be harder to secure. If you’re trying to do a consumer-to-consumer marketplace and aggregating kind of the demand and then just facilitating consumer-to-consumer rentals, the hard part is the fact that what happens in between orders, there’s inspection, there’s the kind of refurbishing of items. And that can be quite burdensome. So that kind of hits the supply a bit. So I think in most marketplaces it’s actually like in consumer-to-consumer at least there’s maybe two to five percent of people that actually kind of actively supply the marketplace constantly and then 90 percent or more just leech out of the supply of the active five percent. So I think that that kind of more laborsome procedures that happen in between rentals is one reason for that.

Tuomo: We’ve seen moves in some categories like in electronics and tech, Grover from Germany is a quite big player. They’ve raised a lot of venture capital. I’m not sure how they’re doing right now. I haven’t checked in a while but they were quite a large player in the phone and laptop space for leasing and renting equipment. But outside of that I haven’t seen that many actually global players operating in the space.

Karri: But is Grover like a marketplace or do they actually own the equipment that they are renting out?

Tuomo: I believe, I hope I get it right. I don’t think there’s like consumers in that marketplace so they own some of the equipment. But I also believe that they act as a channel for professional supply. So they also have supply coming from brands that can list their equipment in Grover. Grover probably then facilitates a lot of the shipping and reverse logistics and the refurbishment operations. But the supply is financed by brands. So I think from a brand’s perspective Grover might be a nice marketplace sales channel that does a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to the actual operational things and the commercial setup. And then the brands just finance the inventory.

Tuomo: There have been others that we’ve seen previously I think that have now exited the market. If we go back four years or so there was a marketplace in the UK at least called Fat Lama. They were running a C2C rental platform in the UK. I think they struggled to turn that into profitability. They looked into securing more professional supply. For example not only enabling consumers to rent their drones or audio and video equipment to each other but actually going to professional supply and asking whether they would like to list their items in Fat Lama’s marketplace. I think there they started hitting the wall that many of the professional suppliers that are willing to engage in rental offerings lack the tools to engage in a scalable way. So they might be running their operation on pen and paper or Excel or in a way that it’s hard for them to do multi-channel sales when it comes to rentals where they need to understand when stuff is coming back and all of these things.

Tuomo: So that’s another friction point which I believe has been preventing many of the rental marketplaces to scale—that the professional supply that is often needed for the refurbishment side has lacked the tools to actually engage in the market in a modern and scalable way.

Karri: Grover was a B2C platform or is still a B2C platform and also Fat Lama kind of turned into that as they struggled with C2C. So what is the main challenge with C2C? You already mentioned that like what happens between the rentals or refurbishment operations but is there also other challenges there?

Tuomo: Yeah I think the challenge might also be that rentals in general, if you combine the amount of supply and the average order value of a booking, from a marketplace perspective you might operate in quite challenging unit economics. So let’s try to have an example. Let’s say the average order value of a booking in my marketplace is $60. I have a pretty high transaction fee, let’s say 20 percent, so that gives me $12 from the actual sale. Now with that $12 I need to somehow make that transaction happen. So I need to bring the demand to the marketplace—many marketplaces need to drive demand with paid marketing early on. $12 is already quite limited in how much you can pay in customer acquisition. Unless you turn into an organic household name it can be hard to drive repeat bookings.

Tuomo: And then the core challenge being that the average order value is so much lower. Whereas if you compare it to something like Airbnb or similar, the average booking is probably a lot higher than $50.

Karri: There’s probably also some kind of limitation in like the area that you are operating. I think small items you might be able to ship but if we’re talking about lawn mowers or anything like that, probably the unit economics don’t make sense if you want to start moving that to different cities.

Tuomo: It has to be super local. Like you said, there might be categories where the item can be shipped. And this is probably the reason why some of these booking platforms are super niche or vertically specialized. Like, let’s say I have a marketplace where people can rent board games and puzzles—those are somewhat easy to ship. And maybe that user base is willing to go through the trouble of making sure all the pieces are there between bookings.

Tuomo: But then like you said—lawn mowers, drones, anything a bit more complicated—the challenge is that I think one marketplace found that for a C2C transaction to happen, they needed the two parties to be less than 0.6 miles apart. Less than a kilometer. And if you think about that, you start to draw circles around supply and demand and you realize they’re quite limited markets.

Tuomo: Now how this might be turned around is that you invite a lot more professional supply to the market. They already have more supply, they’re probably already running a booking operation, so they’re more willing to just look into this channel as extra sales rather than their only channel. They’re already going through the hassle of renting stuff. That might be a solution—but then you have to provide those merchants with appropriate tools that not only help them list in your marketplace, but probably let them run their business with that tool.

Karri: So it sounds like there might already be some C2C transactions happening, but they’re not visible in traditional platforms like Airbnb. They might happen in Nextdoor or something very local and community-tied. There might be a lot happening, but no reason to move to nationwide or international platforms.

Tuomo: Yeah. I have no data, but my hunch is the more local you go, the more trust-based it is. It’s more community helping each other. If I have a ladder and someone needs it for a day, it feels socially awkward to say, “Pay me $20 for it.” Maybe I just loan it to you and gain trust or social credibility. But if I have an extra ladder I don’t need and you want to buy it, I might say, “Pay me $50.” So there’s a psychological difference—booking vs. resale.

Tuomo: In very local use cases, people might not want to haggle over small booking income. And maybe you don’t even need a marketplace—just Venmo, MobilePay, or PayPal. So it’s more about removing friction from payments than building a full marketplace.

Karri: So referencing Ben Thompson’s aggregation theory, the whole idea is that if you capture demand, supply follows. Are you doubtful we’ll ever see a scalable C2C platform here?

Tuomo: I think because it’s local and low AOV, C2C probably won’t scale broadly. You might see some vertical wins, like power tools or DIY stuff. But a general rental marketplace? That’s tough. More realistically, a local marketplace might be powered by professional businesses, because supply from professionals is easier to trust. Better maintenance, more reliability, etc.

Tuomo: Some people may have unused goods they’re not ready to resell but might be willing to rent—if someone else takes care of storing, renting, and managing them. Like vacation homes with a property manager. That’s essentially professionalized supply again.

Karri: Do you think there’s enough demand to run these kinds of businesses?

Tuomo: Yeah. Power tools? For sure. Trailers? Absolutely. Sporting equipment, especially high-end seasonal stuff like bikes or skis? Yes. Baby and maternity gear? Built-in seasonality, so yes. But whether consumers are willing to go through the effort to rent out a ladder for $40? That’s questionable.

Tuomo: The likely outcome is community services—not marketplaces. Maybe a small monetary incentive, but not a VC-backed marketplace. Most successful examples have been in electronics (subscription-based) or occasion wear, and even there the model often involves an intermediary handling the logistics.

Karri: So the better approach might be to aggregate existing rental businesses. Create a platform where their services can be discovered and booked, even add supply from side hustlers or new providers. Make it super easy and trustworthy for the end customer.

Tuomo: Exactly. There’s a lot of rental companies with some customer base but not a lot of visibility. Many lack an online store or booking tool. Some are paper-based. They mostly serve locals or tourists and don’t list items online. So the opportunity is to pool that supply and make it more discoverable.

Tuomo: That’s what we at Twice aim to solve. We think every Twice user should be able to list on any marketplace. When someone comes to your door saying, “Want visibility to new customers?” your answer should be, “Sure,” and our platform should let you do that easily.

Tuomo: The complexity in rentals—calendar syncing, individual items, maintenance, etc.—makes it harder than hotel bookings. In Airbnb, you manage one calendar. In rentals, it could be hundreds or thousands of items. That’s where Twice helps.

Karri: If you had 10 apartments on Airbnb, you’d likely use something like Hostaway. Similarly, rental companies with 100 bikes or tools need a system like Twice to manage availability, listings, maintenance, and more.

Tuomo: Right. And with more frequent bookings, paper or spreadsheets can’t keep up. They need a commerce OS. That lets them sell directly and plug into marketplaces like Facebook Marketplace, Nextdoor, etc.

Karri: So Airbnb started with aggregation, and power users then added direct booking tools. In rentals, everyone has their own small world, and now we need to connect them under a shared infrastructure.

Tuomo: Exactly. In rentals, to survive, you almost have to become a business. You can’t rely on one aggregator. Maybe in tourist hotspots you can get bookings via Booking.com or Bókun. But eventually you want returning customers to book directly, and for that, you need infrastructure.

Tuomo: So to do walk-ins, online sales, and third-party listings, you need a system that supports multi-channel sales.

Karri: So there’s a chicken-and-egg problem. New marketplaces contact rental businesses, and the businesses say, “Sounds good, but how do I list my stuff?” They’re stuck in their old tools.

Tuomo: That’s what Twice is solving. We hope to make supply from professional businesses more accessible to aggregators. Many marketplaces realize too late that they need to build software for their supply. That’s hard and expensive. We’ve seen it over and over.

Tuomo: We’re now in a good place. The new Twice platform is finally solving it. The goal is to make all inventory and orders API-first, marketplace-ready, and independent.

Karri: Can you describe how Twice’s new platform is structured to enable this?

Tuomo: Yes. We’ve separated catalog and inventory. A listing isn’t an SKU. You can create different listings pointing to the same inventory. For example, one might say “Pro Mountain Bike,” another “Trek 2023 XL Model.” That gives flexibility per channel.

Tuomo: You can manage inventory by item, assign availability, automate maintenance, and handle bookings. This mid-layer lets you say, “I’ll list this on five marketplaces and see who books first,” all without creating chaos.

Tuomo: It’s fully decoupled. Orders, inventory, listings—they’re all modular. You can use Twice just for order management if you want. Or just for inventory.

Karri: And listings can even be “infinite availability” if you’re not worried about overbooking.

Tuomo: Exactly. Some merchants care more about getting bookings than double bookings. For those, you can list with infinite availability and sort it out later.

Karri: And you support decoupled order management—Twice knows of the order, but the chat and communication might happen on the marketplace, right?

Tuomo: Yes. You can click into the original order in the marketplace. We store deep links. That’s especially useful because many platforms have their own checkout and refund logic.

Tuomo: So we give you situational awareness—what’s happening across all channels—even if management happens elsewhere.

Karri: So you can take each block separately: orders, inventory, listings, customer management, etc. Use what you need, ignore the rest.

Tuomo: Precisely. And as new sales channels appear, you can add them without deep integration. We want to remove friction at every step.

Karri: So what happens when all of this is available next year? How does the market change?

Tuomo: We think entrepreneurs will build marketplaces with ease, knowing the supply side is digitized. If you see trailer rental demand in your city, you can build a platform and plug into rental businesses using Twice.

Tuomo: Similarly, local tourism boards or business associations can create discovery platforms for their services. All powered by a shared infrastructure. That’s what we’re enabling.

Tuomo: We want the next big rental aggregator to say, “We could do this because the supply was already accessible—thanks to platforms like Twice.”

Karri: So new aggregators focus on getting demand. Supply is already managed. The infrastructure is in place. They can just connect the two.

Tuomo: Exactly. And that’s happening already. More to come this year.

Karri: Great! This was a different episode—more speculative and future-looking. We’d love to hear if you enjoyed it. Thanks, Tuomo!

Tuomo: Thanks!