SplitTheRent launches customized sites for Australia and New Zealand

Melbourne, VIC – SplitTheRent, a personal finance website that makes it simple to keep track of shared bills and living expenses, has responded to strong demand from users in Australia and New Zealand and has launched custom versions of its website at SplitTheRent.com.au and SplitTheRent.co.nz.

By using SplitTheRent, each member of a shared flat or sharehouse can create a free account and input group expenses that they paid for (such as rent, electricity bills, or grocery trips). SplitTheRent organizes all the shared expenses onto one page and tells each flatmate what they owe and who needs to be paid back. The website can also can generate automatic email reminders, track shared spending by category, and give advice on common sharing problems.

“Nearly 30% of our visitors are from outside the US, and Australia is our biggest source of international traffic,” says co-founder and Harvard graduate student Jonathan Bittner. “We received a lot of requests from Australian and New Zealand users to include weekly and fortnightly rent as an option. I happened to be studying in Melbourne myself this winter, so it was a great opportunity to launch Australian and Kiwi versions of the site.”

SplitTheRent.com.au and SplitTheRent.co.nz also use international date-formatting (such as 31/12/2011). Existing users and new visitors to SplitTheRent who want to switch to this date format can modify their date preferences through the apartment “settings” page.

More updates, international versions, and features will be coming in the next few months. “We plan to create customizations for other countries soon, but Australia and New Zealand seemed like the best places to start,” says Bittner.

About SplitTheRent

SplitTheRent's mission is to make shared living simple, organized, and fair. The site is cofounded by Jonathan Bittner, an astrophysics graduate student at Harvard, and Ryan Laughlin, a Yale computer science student.

SplitTheRent went into public beta testing in late April 2011 and has already received over 5,000 enthusiastic early adopters. The site has made headlines (NYT, AOL, Freakonomics, Lifehacker) and received hundreds of thousands of hits since February 2011, when it debuted its innovative “rent-splitting calculator,” which divides rent fairly among housemates based on the size and quality of each bedroom. SplitTheRent is a finalist in the prestigious MassChallenge startup competition.