Bedly announced today it has raised a $2.7M seed round from Accomplice, Founder Collective and several local angel investors, including Diane Hessan, who stepped down as Startup Institute CEO last year to run a research group for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.
The company, an online platform that lets you rent rooms and apartments by the month or longer terms, raised the funding to expand in its existing markets — Boston and NYC — and build new features for its website.
Founded in New York in June 2015, Bedly added Boston as its second rollout market in the summer of 2016, thanks to connections developed during a six-month stay in the MassChallenge accelerator.
Currently, the company is co-located in New York and Cambridge. About half of the company’s inventory and community is in Boston, according to Bedly CEO and co-founder Martin Greenberg. The Cambridge office on First Street has a three-people staff, plus a handful of remote workers.
To get started with Bedly, users need to select Boston or New York as the location for their housing, the start date of their lease and the maximum rent they can afford. Bedly offers both furnished rooms and apartments for a monthly rent ranging from $600 to $4,000. Rooms and apartments can be rented month-to-month, with a higher monthly fee or a fixed-term at a three-month minimum.
According to the company, Bedly’s members are primarily young professionals and students. In an interview with BostInno, Greenberg said that real estate and rentals are changing since Millennials — people born between the early 1980s and late 1990s — came into the picture.
“[Millennials] are the largest demographic of renters in the United States,” the Cape Cod native said. “Millennials move around a lot more, they change jobs about three times more often than the previous generation.”
The needs of Millennials collide with what landlords usually offer, according to Greenberg: a 12-month fixed term lease in an unfurnished house, with utilities to set up.
Let’s say, for example, that I’m interested in a room in East Cambridge. According to Bedly, there’s a fully-furnished private bedroom available in Lechmere Square for $1,240 per month. If I booked this room, Bedly would take care of maintenance, utilities, and Wi-Fi. Payment, lease and background check could be completed online. I could choose to pay a higher rent month-to-month, or a fixed rent in the case I confirm in advance I'll be staying for at least three months.
Thanks to the concierge service on the website, I could also connect with potential roommates. Part of the $2.7 million funding round will be used to add new features to the website, including additional information about roommates and apartments.
People who sign up for Bedly go over a background check that includes national and county records, sex offender lists and terrorist watch lists.
“Once you become a Bedly member, you have the ability to move around within the network,” Greenberg said. “It’s all about choice, and right now in real estate there’s no choice.”
Bedly leases from building and condo owners and manages all day-to-day administrative, tenant communications and property management functions for them. In Boston, Bedly has deals with Hodara Real Estate Group, Torrington Properties, Mount Vernon and Boston Investments.
A potential competitor of Bedly could be Airbnb, but Greenberg pointed out that most of the inventory currently available on Airbnb is for short-term rentals (less than 30 days). He added that Airbnb is focused on vacation rental market.
“You could take a risk on a couple-of-day vacation, but if you move to Boston or New York for a job, you really want to make sure that what you’re getting is what you intended, because you don’t really want to take that risk,” Greenberg said.
