A Cambridge startup promising a consumer-friendly apartment rental platform launched today, backed and run by veterans of CarGurus and TripAdvisor who say their search expertise can help them beat out an already crowded market.
Langley Steinert, a founder of both of those established companies, created ApartmentAdvisor about a year ago with the mission of making the rental search process easier and more transparent.
The startup launched its new product today to compete with sites like Craigslist, Apartments.com, Zillow, Hotpads and others.
“We think the process is broken,” said CEO Tom Gilmore, who worked at TripAdvisor after selling his own startup to the company. “The whole industry is kind of stuck in this Web 1.0 space that came out of the classified model, and there hasn’t been a ton of innovation since then.”
ApartmentAdvisor's team is banking on using similar algorithms to those that powered CarGurus toward being a car buying giant.
ApartmentAdvisor’s website lists rental properties in a similar manner to existing sites, but one of the features the team hopes will set it apart is a sorting tool that evaluates how good a deal renters would be getting, ranking them from “Great Deal” to “Overpriced.” That distinction, Gilmore said, has already raised some eyebrows among property owners using the site.
“I think it helps people understand what we’re doing and what value we’re providing,” he said.
The site operates on a “freemium” model, where property owners pay nothing to upload their listings, but can sign up for an enhanced account to sponsor their listings and get other extra features.
“To be honest, we haven't focused much on monetizing anything yet. We're just trying to build a good product,” Gilmore said.
In addition to Gilmore and Steinert, the company’s top brass include Josh Arnold, former engineering lead at Tripadvisor, and Oliver Chrzan, former CTO at CarGurus.
ApartmentAdvisor is privately funded with many of the same investors as CarGurus, Gilmore said.
“It's all public that that CarGurus and TripAdvisor raised $5 million or less in order to build those companies," he said. "So we think we can take a similar approach here."
