About Inktrue
Housing is the largest monthly expense for half of Americans, and it is priced in the dark.
The tenant negotiating a renewal or signing a lease usually has no idea what the same unit down the hall or across the street pays. The small landlord guessing at a number based on a few nearby listings has no idea either. The people who do know, the platforms sitting on millions of rent rolls, cannot say so publicly, because their knowledge was assembled in a way that only works behind a closed door or they'll risk the DOJ knocking on their door.
We are building the version that works in the open.
Our data comes from the people who pay the rent, not pooled among the people who set it. That single structural fact is what allows us to publish a methodology, gather and understand more data about each rental unit, defend a number in front of a hostile party, and stand on the same side of the table as any person reading our report.
"We are not in the business of producing an estimate. We are in the business of being accountable for one."
What that commits us to
We work towards mathematical certainty, no matter who is paying.
What we publish has to be supported by hard data we can cite. If the answer requires a caveat, we don't ship it. We target accuracy and stand on our data in every scenario.
We show our work, including the parts that don't flatter us.
Every displayed figure carries its geography and its basis. The Inktrue methodology is public, and is versioned. We collect a unique layer of data, and we show our answers, we are accountable for what we produce.
Read the methodologyThe report is our product, and it does not compromise.
A shared report link always delivers the full report. Never a teaser, never a paywalled summary of our own analysis. We allow partners to co-brand reports, but they cannot co-opt our integrity or secretly manipulate the results.
See a full sample reportOur name stays on it.
The Inktrue mark and the methodology link are non-removable at every tier and every price. We certify rent when it falls within a range of what we calculate as the True Market Rent. We stand by our calculations, our methods, and our output. Our unique value is our independent methods, transparency, and proprietary renter data.
How certification worksBright lines we will not cross
These are not judgment calls. They do not have a price, and no individual is authorized to grant an exception, including the founder.
- We do not sell, license, or broker user-level data, or lease-expiration timing.
- We do not feed one owner's non-public rents into another owner's pricing recommendation.
- We do not white-label the report or remove the methodology link.
- We do not deliver a partial report through a share link.
- We do not publish an accuracy figure we cannot reproduce on request.
- We do not build features whose purpose is to help one party extract from the other party without their knowledge.
Angus Bernstein
Rent is one of the largest numbers in a household's monthly budget, and almost nobody can check whether the price they signed up for is fair.
Market comparables are only part of the solution. Current rent analysis tools are terribly inaccurate, and using AI to generate a rent estimate fails while being confidently wrong. Public data layers can narrow the problem, but the user experience data layer is completely missing from the market.
Inktrue started out as a mathematics problem, but since rent exists in a dynamic market, with varied data sources, and with constantly changing variables, the reality hit that rent is not a pricing problem. Uncovering optimal rent is a measurement problem, and measurement problems have answers.
After nearly a year of analysis we are confident that Inktrue gathers data and answers the optimal rent problem better than any other rent analysis model we could find.
Angus is currently studying mathematics at Amherst College (Class of 2027). In 2025 he completed the AI for Business and Finance program at Columbia Business School. For the past several years he has been focused on applying machine learning, predictive analytics, and generative AI to real business and finance problems like optimal rent pricing for reducing transactional friction in the rental market.
The mathematical model behind every Inktrue report is his.
The methodology that explains it is public, versioned, and written to be argued with, because a number you cannot check is only an opinion.
Angus is a full-time student, but when he's not in class you'll probably find him on a golf course, quietly muttering obscenities to himself while trying (and usually failing) to perfect his short game.