Managing Rentals Manually or Using an Automated Service?

If you are involved in Splinterlands, you can look at it from three perspectives:

• as a card collector
• as an investor
• as a player

Card collectors' main objective is to have full collections. They are true holders.

Investors buy assets but they expect a return in a reasonable amount of time. They don't necessarily hold for a long time, unlike collectors, unless there is a profit perspective in that.

Players... play. In Splinterlands they also earn while playing.

The three categories are not disjunct, meaning a player can hold cards long-term just like a collector or be more interested in trends, as investors.

Rental Market is a Big Part of Splinterlands

Someone holding cards in-game can rent them out. As we saw above, all three categories can actually hold cards.

Collectors could rent out their entire collection if they don't play the game, investors can optimize their rental income and players can rent out their cards they are not using (as often).

Managing and optimizing rentals can be a complex and time-consuming operation.

With that, the need for more automation arose.

From the initial rental contracts, for a set number of days and the possibility to require escrow, to the daily rentals we have now and the addition of seasonal rentals coming in the future, the rental market evolves over time.

And while at first managing rentals was a very hands-on task, now it can be sped up significantly, even with options available in Peakmonsters. Still, that's not fully automated and you have complete control over what's going on.

I still call it managing rentals manually, although Peakmonsters does 95% of the work. But you have to know what to tell it to do and you need to show up daily or even multiple times per day and go through the process(es). Could be as little as 10 seconds, if all you have to do is re-rent some cards at the current market prices.

Fully Automated Rental Management

The alternative is using a service that uses an algorithm to improve the rental income. Word is it has a significantly better performance than manually managing rentals. This could be true in most cases. If you are not active in managing your rentals, this is almost certain.

The service that I know of (might be others too) is called Splinterlands.Rentals.

To be able to use it, you would need to set up a separate account where to move your rentals, because you need to share your private posting key of that account with the service. At least that's what I was told. But for more info, you can join their discord. Just to assure you, the private posting key, doesn't give the service control over the assets, only the possibility to manage rentals (to post custom_json operations on Hive).

If you want to know more, it was talked about in the latest Monster Maverick show.

There is an unknown factor that will affect this service, and this is the season rentals. With more rental income predictability, a little daily tweaking for a 20% fee may not be worth it. Remains to be seen at that point.

I am not decided to use the automated service yet, even though it could be a little better in my case, but not significantly. I like the full control I have in PeakMonsters.

But if you don't manage your rentals often, this could be the option for you. And to be fair, if that's the case and you start using the automated service and it provides what people say it provides, every owner wins: you - you get better rental income, the service - another user, another 20% fee on rentals, the rental market grows. People renting may not be as happy if that happens, because they'll have to pay more for renting cards.

Do you use this service? How are the results for you?

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