RentLab gathers and curates public data to create the Smart Living Score for individual rental properties. Properties are color-coded on the map depending on how sustainable they are relative to other properties in that community.

The Score includes all aspects of sustainability and affordability: walkability, access to recycling, energy and water efficiency, affordability (including acceptance of Housing Choice Vouchers (Section 8)), utility billing structure (i.e. what bills are included in the rent), and a variety of other factors depending on local data availability.

For each community, the score evolves over time as more data becomes available. Initially, properties are ranked out based on a subset of points (e.g., X points out of 65). Once the Score is fully developed in a community, the Score will stabilize as a total number of points out of 100.

Site visitors can click on individual properties to get a basic summary of that property, click on the "View details" button to see more information about how the score was calculated, or click on the "Contribute data" button to add or correct information.

Our goal is to empower both tenants and landlords to see sustainability-related features of individual properties, and to make housing and investment decisions based on better, more complete information. Eventually, we aim to integrate our data into other rental search sites to make it as easy as possible to use.