Terms of use

This is the agreement you accept by using Rentnook. The short version: Rentnook keeps the record of a rental and carries the conversation. It never touches the money.

Who this is

Rentnook is an iPhone app published by Rick Conner, an individual rather than a company. On this page, "we" and "us" mean him, and "you" means whoever is using the app. These terms are an agreement between you and him.

By creating an account or using Rentnook you accept them. If you do not, do not use the app. Anything here can be asked about at support@rentnook.app, and a person reads what arrives there.

You have to be 18

Rentnook is for the two sides of a tenancy agreement, which is a contract adults sign. You must be 18 or over to use it, and it is not directed at children. It is offered in the United States.

If you are using Rentnook for a company you own — many landlords hold property that way — you are agreeing to these terms on its behalf as well as your own.

What Rentnook is, and what it is not

Rentnook is a record-keeping and messaging tool. It holds what a landlord and their tenants need in one place: what rent is owed and what was recorded as paid, a private conversation, and the lease document.

It is not a bank, an escrow service, a payment processor, a money transmitter or a payment app. It never holds, moves, receives, forwards or touches your money. There is no wallet inside it, no balance you could withdraw, and no way to send a payment through it. We charge no fee on rent and take no cut of anything that passes between you and the other person.

What the rent is, when it is due, and whether a payment arrived are the landlord's statements. Rentnook does not verify any of it and could not: it has no view into anyone's account. Nothing in the app is a guarantee that a payment was made, received, or is owed.

Not legal advice, and not a lease

Nothing in Rentnook or on this site is legal advice. A rent record in the app is not a lease, not a legal notice, and not necessarily the receipt your state requires a landlord to give. What a lease or a receipt has to say varies by state and by city, and it is not something an app can settle for you.

Using Rentnook creates no landlord-tenant relationship with us. We are not your landlord, not your tenant, not your agent, not a property manager, and not a party to your lease. Your rental is an agreement between the two of you and it stands on its own terms, not on ours.

You stay responsible for your own compliance with the law that applies to you — landlord-tenant law, fair-housing law, notice periods, deposit handling, receipt and record-keeping requirements, and tax. If something matters legally, check it or ask a lawyer.

Payment apps are between you and them

Rent is paid outside Rentnook, through whatever the two of you agreed: Venmo, PayPal, Cash App, Zelle, a bank transfer, cash, a check. From the moment one of those apps opens you are in that company's hands, under its terms and its privacy policy, not ours. We are not a party to that payment and cannot see, confirm, reverse, recover or insure it.

Keep your own receipts. Whatever your payment app shows you is the real evidence that money moved; the record in Rentnook is your landlord's account of it.

Landlord Mode subscription

Landlord Mode is a landlord's subscription: there is nothing in Rentnook for a tenant to buy, and a tenant is never charged for anything. These terms apply when you subscribe.

• Price. $4.99 a month or $49.99 a year, whichever you pick, with one month free to start. The free month is available once per Apple Account.
• Billing. Through your Apple Account. The free month comes first and nothing is charged during it. The first payment is taken at the end of the free month, unless you turn auto-renew off at least 24 hours before it ends. After that it renews automatically at the same price each period, with the renewal charged in the 24 hours before the current period ends.
• Cancelling. Turn auto-renew off at least 24 hours before the current period ends, or it renews. You manage and cancel in your Apple Account settings — we cannot do it for you, and deleting the app, or your Rentnook account, does not cancel anything.
• Refunds are Apple's. Apple takes the payment, so Apple handles refunds. We cannot issue one.
• Price changes. Apple tells you before a higher price takes effect, and asks you to agree to it in the cases its own rules require.
• What it covers. Up to five active units. Replacing a tenant or adding a roommate does not use up a slot.

What is not allowed here

Rentnook is a private line between a landlord and the people who live in their rental. It works because both sides can rely on it, so there is no tolerance for abusive behavior or objectionable content. These are the same rules as the community guidelines in the app.

Not allowed: threats of violence or harm. Harassment, including repeated unwanted contact. Sexual content or propositions. Language targeting someone's race, color, religion, sex, familial status, national origin or disability. Sharing someone's private information. Impersonating anyone. Using Rentnook to advertise or to run a scam.

Nor may you try to reach a rental that is not yours, interfere with the app or the service behind it, scrape it, or use it to send bulk or automated messages.

Fair housing

Housing discrimination is illegal, and messages sent here are a written record. An announcement can be addressed to a property or a unit — never to a group of people chosen by who they are.

Reporting, blocking, and what we do

Every message can be reported, and so can a comment or a photo on a maintenance request; you can block the other person from a message or a comment. A person reads every report, within 24 hours. For a message or a comment we keep a copy of it as it was sent, so deleting it afterwards changes nothing; a report about a photo keeps only where the photo is stored, not a copy of it. An account that breaks these rules is removed, and we do not need to hear both sides first. We can remove content and end an account under this section without notice.

Blocking stops their messages reaching you in Rentnook and yours reaching them, and it stops a maintenance request the same way — neither of you can file, comment, add a photo or change its status where the other is blocked. It does not end your tenancy, and you may still receive required notices by other means.

Your content stays yours

What you write and upload is yours. We claim no ownership of your messages, your rent records, your documents, or a maintenance request and its photos, and nothing here gives us a right to them beyond running the app for you.

You give us one narrow permission: to store your content, keep it backed up, and show it to the other people in that rental — the landlord of the tenancy and the people living in it — and to nobody else. That permission exists for no other purpose and lasts only as long as we are holding the content for you. We do not sell it, publish it, use it to advertise, or train anything on it.

You are responsible for what you put in: that you have the right to upload it, and that it does not break the section above. Be deliberate about lease documents in particular — they routinely carry Social Security numbers, dates of birth and bank details. What happens to them is set out under Lease documents in the privacy policy.

Ending your account

You can delete your account from inside the app, under Account → Delete account. It is real deletion, not deactivation, it takes effect immediately, and it cannot be undone. What it does not do is reach into the other person's records.

If you are a tenant

Your profile, your sign-in and your personal details are removed, and your access to the tenancy ends at once. What stays is the other side's record of the rental: the rent records your landlord entered, any lease document they uploaded, and their copy of the conversation, including the messages you sent and the name that was on them when you sent them. The name you were using when you joined the tenancy stays on the tenancy record too.

The same is true of a maintenance request: it stays, with any comment you added to it, as part of your landlord's record. A photo you added does not. There is no delete button for a photo in the app. A photo goes when whoever added it deletes their account, when the landlord deletes their account, when the tenancy is deleted, or when we remove it after a report.

If you are a landlord

Deleting your account permanently deletes every property, unit and tenancy you manage, along with their rent history, conversations, lease documents, and maintenance requests and photos. Your tenants lose access to all of it straight away. If anyone renting from you may need a copy of their lease or their rent history, send it to them before you delete, because afterwards nobody can.

We can also end an account that breaks these terms, as the section above says. When an account ends either way, the parts of this agreement that are about what already happened stay in force: the disclaimers, the limits on liability, and the governing-law section.

Apple's part in this

• This agreement is between you and Rick Conner only. Apple is not a party to it and is not responsible for Rentnook or its contents.
• Your licence is a personal, non-transferable right to use Rentnook on Apple-branded devices you own or control, under the Usage Rules in Apple's App Store Terms of Service.
• Support is ours, not Apple's. Apple has no obligation to furnish any maintenance or support for Rentnook. Write to support@rentnook.app and a person will read it.
• Warranty. If Rentnook fails to conform to any warranty that applies, you may tell Apple, and Apple will refund what you paid for the app, if anything. Beyond that, Apple has no warranty obligation at all.
• Claims are ours to answer. Anything else about the app — a product-liability claim, a claim that it fails to meet a legal or regulatory requirement, a consumer-protection claim, a claim that it infringes someone's rights — is for us to address, not Apple.
• Apple and its subsidiaries are third-party beneficiaries of these terms, and Apple has the right to enforce them against you.
• Where you are. By using Rentnook you confirm that you are not in a country the United States government has embargoed or has designated as supporting terrorism, and that you are not on any United States government list of prohibited or restricted parties.
• Who to write to. Questions, complaints and claims about Rentnook go to us, not to Apple, at the name and address under Contact below.

What we do not promise

Rentnook is provided as it is. We work to keep it running and correct, but we do not promise that it will always be available, that every message will arrive, that every notification will fire, or that nothing will ever go wrong. Phones lose signal, push services drop things, and servers have bad days.

Keep your own copies of anything that matters — a lease, a receipt, a message you may need later. Rentnook is a convenience, not the only place a record should live, and it is not a substitute for the records the law where you live requires you to keep.

We do not check the people using Rentnook. We do not verify identities, we do not screen landlords or tenants, and we do not confirm that a property exists, that someone owns it, or that a rent amount is what was agreed. What the other person tells you is theirs, not ours.

We are not responsible for what happens between a landlord and a tenant: unpaid rent, an eviction, a deposit, a repair, damage, or a disagreement about what was said. That is your rental. If it reaches a court, the two of you are the parties to it.

Limits on liability

If someone brings a claim against us because of what you did here — what you uploaded, how you treated someone, or the rental you were part of — you agree to cover our costs of dealing with it.

Some states do not allow these limits, so they may not apply to you, and nothing here limits liability for fraud or for anything the law does not permit us to limit.

Governing law, and where disputes are heard

These terms are governed by the law of West Virginia, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. Anything we cannot settle between us goes to the state or federal courts sitting in West Virginia, and we both agree those courts may hear it.

If you live in another state, its consumer-protection law may give you rights that this section cannot take away, and it does not try to.

Changes to these terms

If these terms change, the date at the top of this page changes with them. If a change matters — if it alters what you are agreeing to in a way you would care about — we will say so in the app before it takes effect, rather than editing this page quietly and counting on you to check. Carrying on using Rentnook after a change means you accept it. If you would rather not, delete your account.

Contact