Apartment List Seeks to Reinvent Property Rentals Nationwide

Will Schmidt Jan 31, 2013 Tweet

Some of the biggest problems associated with rental housing revolve around the fact that there is no central hub for online, easy to access listings. The argument could be made that Craigslist accomplishes this task, but the reality is that Craigslist has a profundity of non-comprehensive and disorganized listings. Padmapper received a cease and desist from Craigslist because it was siphoning listings from them. Not to mention there are people out there who love to prey on the scam-friendly. However, the days of maligned property listings are growing short. Cofounders John Kobs and Chris Herndon decided to grab this beast by its horns and wrestle it to the ground when they designed and released Apartment List: an aesthetically beautiful and extremely user-friendly website that lists millions of rental properties nationwide.

The Silicon Valley HQ has a team with experience ranging across major companies like Google, Yelp, Yahoo, Amazon, Gilt Groupe, Boston Consulting Group, TICC Capital, Thomas Weisel Partners, and Goldman Sachs. Already having won a Webby Award, Apartment List pines to produce better results than its counterparts. “Apartment List is on a mission to reinvent the market for rentals in the U.S.,” says Kobs. He continues, “Finding a new home to rent is a pain point that regularly affects 100 million American renters. Unlike Zillow and Trulia, which are primarily focused on resale real estate, Apartment List is 100% laser focused on the U.S. rental market.” With a powerhouse resume of experience, the access to a fantastic market, and the determination to never fail, Apartment List will not stop at just one Webby.

Once the user inputs a specific United States zip code, amongst other settings like price point or number of bedrooms, the view is broken down into neighborhoods with pop up indicators for available listings. Every listing has been submitted to Apartment List by realtors, and this provides a level of transparency competitors have been hard pressed to show. The photos are accurate and up to date, the information for the realtor is on the listing, and there are no outdated listings. “Unlike our competition, Apartment List has built partnerships with hundreds of leading listing sources to ensure that we are diversified and showing renters only the freshest, most legitimate and accurate listings from around the Web,” says Herndon.

The overall aim of Apartment List can be synthesized into one sentence from the co-founding team, “We want to save people time, money, and headaches in the process of renting their next home.” That is the honest truth, and with the current success of the website, it is hard to imagine that these guys would not put the need of the consumer first. Apartment List is the fastest-growing apartment search engine out there, and it truly is reinventing the rental market and the way Americans search for rentals. When a vision is built on a foundation of trust and transparency, success based on hard work and dedication is the only option for Kobs and Herndon as they move forward.