NowRenting, a web-based software platform that automates the entire rental process for landlords, leasing agents and tenants, has been acquired by a San Francisco-based apartment search company called Zumper.
Zumper is a platform used by millions of renters to find houses, rooms, condos or apartments for rent. The company allows people to jump to the front of the line for competitive apartments and avoid crowded open houses.
Renters can filter by location, price range, bedroom count, pet-friendly or amenity and set an alert to get notifications when a new listing is posted. The platform, which has raised $90 million in venture capital to date, also offers real-time alerts and inventory is updated in real-time as well.
The acquisition ends a two-year journey for NowRenting, which went live in the beginning of 2018.
“It got to the point where we were either going to have to merge, get acquired or go out and raise capital,” Ed Giardina, CEO and founder of NowRenting, told Rhode Island Inno. “So I reached out to Zumper in hopes to see if it was a good fit and ironically enough it was a perfect fit. It was perfect timing as well. They had been focused really on the public search and generating applicants for all of the landlords and property managers ... and their next step is to build some landlord tools that will help their customers and that’s really where we focus.”
While NowRenting had been actively growing its user base all over the country, Giardina, a serial entrepreneur, said the bulk of the focus for its team was really on the technology and the tools the company offered landlords.
The platform enables leasing agents or do-it-yourself landlords to not only list rentals on the site, but also send pre-screening questions to renters, message on the site, conduct full background checks, sign digital leases, collect rent and manage maintenance requests.
The acquisition will benefit Zumper because it will give them a boost in the Boston market, where NowRenting has its largest group of users. Giardina and his team will remain in Providence and work out of the new District Hall space in the city where they will be a tenant at CIC.
Zumper already has a big sales and business development team, enabling the NowRenting team to focus on the technology.
Giardina said the goal for his team will be to examine the wide array of tools NowRenting has created, see what works best for landlords and really polish those tools to eventually be integrated into Zumper’s platform.
“They offer tools like rent collection, background checks and a great mobile app for their applicants to find vacancies and rentals,” he said. “The goal for the future is to build a new product from the ground up using inspiration from NowRenting and build it into Zumper for these landlords.”
In order to do this, NowRenting will be aggressively hiring engineers to ramp up its capabilities. Giardina said the goal is to hire another 10 to 15 engineers by the end of 2019.
“It’s nice to be able to have a startup in San Francisco well funded with an engineering team here in Providence,” he said. “I think it’s a good thing for Rhode Island and a good thing for Providence.”
