Milwaukee's Frontdesk Inc. started in the short-term apartment rental industry for travelers, but its product roadmap leads to the longer-term rental market and even commercial real estate.
The vehicle for that expansion is Levr Solutions, a new software business the company began rolling out in late September. It's under the Frontdesk corporate umbrella, but is separate from Frontdesk Stays, the short-term apartment rental service the company launched in 2017.
Levr is the newest iteration of Frontdesk Flex, which launched last year and was focused on giving Frontdesk Stay customers in multifamily apartments the technology to power their own short-term rental listings. With Levr, the company envisions a broader audience that includes its current market but could also include long-term rental properties.
"We see this platform being used by commercial real estate professionals and companies in all categories of property management," Frontdesk co-founder and chief product officer Jesse DePinto said.
Levr allows users to post and manage their listings on multiple sites including Airbnb, Vrbo and Expedia. It also offers tools to help hosts automate and scale their businesses, including a dynamic pricing algorithm, unified inbox and smart lock integration.
While it still specializes in short-term rentals, Levr will eventually offer more options for mid- to long-term rental managers, DePinto said. It already has customers that serve short- and long-term tenants under the same property, as well as clients that help real estate investors buy and sell single-family homes and offer short-term rentals as a value-added service, he said.
"The world of real estate and hospitality are converging at an unprecedented rate," DePinto said. "There's a lot of opportunity in that middle ground to advertise apartments for 60 nights on Airbnb or three months on Zillow. We aim to capture that middle ground."
Levr operates as a startup within Frontdesk and currently has around five team members working on it, including DePinto. Within the next year, he expects the Levr team to grow to at least 20 people.
Frontdesk is the Milwaukee area's fastest-growing company, according to the most recent annual Inc. 5000 list. DePinto said Levr is growing more rapidly than Frontdesk Stays.
Levr currently has a few early customers from Frontdesk Flex representing a total of around 120 units. Within weeks of offering a private beta version of Levr, the company had interest from 15 customers representing a total of 1,500 units, DePinto said. The platform is running in beta through the end of the year.
"There's more demand than we have the capacity to fulfill," DePinto said.
