On Tuesday, San Fransisco-based used furniture marketplace Move Loot announced it would be expanding to cover the D.C. area. The introduction of Move Loot into D.C. will allow the company to effectively rival other classified services like Craigslist and OrderUp, which are sometimes used to negotiate the sale and purchase of furniture and other goods.
Move Loot, aside form acting as an online marketplace, will also help users coordinate shipping and delivery through on-ground, partnering logistics teams and storage warehouses. Users who download Move Loot can coordinate the sale, pickup, packaging and delivery of furniture from the mobile-first platform. In exchange, Move Loot takes a 25 percent cut from those transactions.
In an interview with DC Inno, co-founder and CEO Bill Bobbitt said that D.C. is an advantageous market for MoveLoot because the city has a "high population density at nearly 10,000 [people] per square mile... [and] the metro population is the fourth largest in the U.S."
Founded in 2014, Move Loot, a Y Combinator alum who has raised $21.8 million in funding, also announced the introduction of its service into Chicago and Philadelphia on Tuesday.
The company had already established its business in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Atlanta and North Carolina. San Francisco and Los Angeles are the only two markets with localized offices.
"Currently, our presence will be through our third-party partners (trained on our technology and procedures) until demand grows enough in the area to sustain an on-the-ground investment and team. We have proven that the model works with volume—our operations are profitable in SF and LA with this model—so we are bullish that D.C. will reach that point quickly," Bobbitt explained.
Unlike OrderUp or Craigslist, which allows users to manually set their own prices and curate a list of items online, Move Loot encourages people to post furniture in good condition from popular retailers like Room & Board and Crate & Barrel.
Once a couch, for example, is posted via the platform by a user, an internal Move Loot team will access photos detailing the condition of the couch before determining a price and accepting the listing.
Bobbitt told DC Inno, "collectively, expansion to these new markets allows us to serve an additional 21 million people in the greater metro areas of each of these cities; All three are in the top 10 metro areas in the U.S., bringing our Move Loot presence to a total of 9 regional markets within the top 10."
A third-party shipping logistics service called ShipHawk manages delivery options, locally, per city.
Last fall, the San Fransisco startup opened its marketplace up to furniture retailers, so that brick-and-mortar stores could begin to sell retuned items and arrange pick ups through Move Loot.
Over the last year, Move Loot has expanded to one new city per financial quarter and experienced an average 20 percent growth in users month-over-month. Bobbitt said that his 70-person West Coast company has helped coordinate the sale of more than 50,000 pieces of furniture since being founded. He declined to disclose revenue numbers for Move Loot.
"D.C. in particular is an important market for us because we are already seeing high demand from users in the area who have signed up for our waitlist," Bobbitt explained.
*Image Credit: Drew Coffman via unsplash.com
