It's a pain to find the perfect place to rent in an exceptionally high-demand market like Austin. By the time you find a prospect, it often gets scooped up before you can schedule a viewing and crank out the paperwork.
Ben Doherty and Zac Maurais, who founded delivery startup Favor (acquired by H-E-B), are launching a new startup that might make it significantly easier. It's called Sunroom, and it helps people find and tour apartments and homes for rent.
You set detailed criteria for your search, find cool places on their site and then pick as many potential rentals as you want to tour. Sunroom then connects you with their agents -- called tour guides -- who will show you the apartment during a choosen window of time that's convenient for you. It cuts the sometimes long wait and scheduling pains of seeing a place before it's rented to someone else.
Right now, Sunroom is focused on the Austin area, but it plans to eventually expand.
It's free for renters, and landlords pay a fee if Sunroom places a qualified tenant. Then, the startup uses backend tech to make online applications easy and a dispatching app to alert licensed agents who can show rental properties (you have to be a licensed agent in Texas to show rentals).
Along with the launch, Sunroom announced it has raised $1.5M in seed funding. The investment comes from Founders Fund Angel, Tim Draper of Draper Associates, Joshua Baer of Capital Factory, Active Capital and Boost.VC.
Maurais told me that he and Doherty really wanted to do a startup in the real estate space. They've both been renters and had rough experiences. They tested a few ideas -- full service property management and alternative security deposits -- but the thing they kept hearing from landlords was how tricky it is to find good renters. That led to Sunroom, which they started working on in November.
“We knew we wanted to do something inside of the rental market because it’s so massive and affects a lot of people," he said. "I’ve had bad landlords in the past and have been renting for the past decade. So I understand first hand.”
Sunroom also has a long game. Prospective renters can use the platform to apply for apartments and homes, and that information is then available next time if the renter wants to find a new place.
"It's almost like you're building out your renter's resume," Maurais said.
Meanwhile, Sunroom is building a roster of licensed real estate agents that are reachable through its dispatch app.
Austin has thousands of agents, many of whom may have significant downtime between selling homes, and Sunroom acts as both a potential full-time job or side hustle to earn more money.
On average, the tour guide agents make $20 an hour -- as opposed to a potential commission. They only have to show the property -- cutting out lead generation and other paperwork traditional apartment finders deal with.
"We thought that in some ways it’s tough for these agents," Maurais said. "They might go a long time without selling a house or having a deal. So we thought it would be cool to change the compensation model and create a new job.”
