Company: Apartment List, San Francisco, CA
Company Description: Apartment List is the world’s first online apartment matching engine. Its technology leverages a renter’s preferences and social network to recommend the best apartments and the best neighborhoods, eliminating the hassle and frustration of searching through thousands of irrelevant listings. Founded in 2011 by John Kobs and Chris Herndon in San Francisco, Apartment List is a Vertical Brands co.
Nomination Category: Products & Product Management Categories
Nomination Sub Category: New Product or Service of the Year - Consumer Services

Nomination Title: Apartment List

Tell the story about this nominated product or service (up to 500 words). Describe its function, features, benefits, and performance to date.

More than 100 million people in the US are estimated to reside in rented households. For the majority of those people, renting is a frustrating, time-consuming, poorly informed, and often offline process. The apartment industry moved online many years ago but in large part simply transferred listings from newspapers and flyers to a webpage. There has been little innovation since. Even minor improvements in the online search process such as mobile apps or overlays for crime have been limited to certain markets or are not uniformly implemented.

Apartment List aims to completely transform the way people find apartments.

Their vision is for a world in which it is easy, fast and even enjoyable to find and rent an apartment. To accomplish this, the team sat down in front of a blank whiteboard and designed the best way to find an apartment online from the ground up. The result was an apartment matching engine and full social media integration.

In September 2011, Apartment List launched the world’s first apartment matching engine. The development and application of this technology is innovative for its use, its market segment focus, and its technology design.

Through a Facebook login, Apartment List leverages behaviors and data from Facebook to match renters with the handful of apartments that best fit their personal tastes from a database of nearly 2 million listings. But since apartments are not selected as often as books on Amazon or movies on Netflix, Apartment List designed a recommendation engine from scratch that used a series of fun and seemingly random, but incredibly insightful questions to help seed the engine and identify appropriate matches. Example questions include “What superpower would you choose?” and “What is your favorite birthday cake?“ These key preference questions supplement the engine with more frequent actions and choices to better match users with apartments.

Built on top of the matching engine is a system of social media and design features that enhances the overall apartment hunting experience. All apartments are located on a Google Map that also features Yelp recommendations near each apartment and Facebook check-ins from friends. This provides a customized snapshot of the neighborhood and its livability. In addition, the engine enables group apartment hunting with Facebook friends.

In sum, the matching engine and social media integration makes the entire apartment renting process more efficient and more enjoyable. Essentially, Apartment List is crowd-sourcing the apartment search by leveraging the answers of previous visitors to the site to make a new user’s experience better. This proprietary matching technology is disrupting and completely changing an industry.

In the 30 days after its launch, renters on Apartment List answered more than 100,000 questions on the engine. It was found that the question “Do you watch Dancing with the Stars?” is also the most predictive question on the site and most useful in making apartment matches.

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Provide a brief (up to 100 words) biography about the leader(s) of the team that developed this nominated product or service:

John Kobs is a successful technology entrepreneur and innovator. He co-founded Apartment List in 2011. Prior, John co-founded Vertical Brands, a vertical search-marketing firm that connects consumers with services through a portfolio of user-friendly technology powered sites. He also serves as the Chairman and co-founder of Chat Sports, an online social networking experience for sports fans. Previously, John was an investor at TICC Capital, a Greenwich-based investment, and an investment banker at both Thomas Weisel Partners and KeyBanc Capital Markets. John graduated from Case Western Reserve University with a degree in Business Management and a concentration in Finance.