Zumper expands nationwide taking a 'mobile-first' approach to real-estate

Finding an apartment in a major city is can be a time-consuming, exhausting, and stressful process that makes sleeping on a friend’s floor seem like a desirable option. Zumper released its apartment rental search and Pro tools nationwide today to make searching for an apartment less of a nightmare.

Apartment hunters enter a few basic search parameters like location, price range, number of bedrooms, pet-friendly, and Zumper presents available listings on a map. Clicking into a pin yields more information about the place, including photos, street view images, amenities, and information about the neighborhood. Users can create customized listing feeds to follow neighborhoods they like and get notified when any relevant listings are added. The site has a messaging tool to contact realtors about properties that interest you.

“We’ve helped well over 100,000 renters move in only our first 9 months of being live,” said CEO Anthemos “Anth” Georgiades to VentureBeat. “Our product saves tenants a significant amount of time getting down to what they actually want, and our data, which we’ve tested, is more accurate than our competitors. Listings are still available and there is no spam as we verify every single landlord & broker who posts to us.”

The startup released its Zumper Pro in a private testing phase four months ago. Zumper Pro is a iOS application that enables realtors and landlords to easily create and post listings on-the-spot. They can look at a place, snap photos, and enter basic information in an interface designed for smartphones. There are also features for scheduling appointments.

“Our Pro product is mobile first, and we’re betting big that this is the future of real estate,” Georgiades said. “Real estate is, after all, an industry that is often practiced in the field. Many landlords and brokers post directly to our site through Zumper Pro, so these are real-listings posted in real-time, and we get many of these listings before any other search site because we power the software.”

Zumper is operating in a fragmented, challenging and crowded market. Craigslist is still a dominant force, while large real estate listing sites Zillow and Trulia also offer rental options, and smaller startups like Apartment List and PadMapper (which was sued by Craigslist) are working to create a more user-friendly search process. Zumper started by focusing on consumers, but quickly realized that the greater need was to give landlords, and brokers better options for managing their listings. This also serves to build out its supply of listings, which helps to attract consumers. Thousands of listings are now posted through the Pro software every month.

Zumper is currently active in New York City, San Francisco, and Chicago, but Georgiades said there is strong demand from other big rental markets like Boston, DC, and LA from both tenants and landlords. In addition to national expansion, Zumper is working on an iOS app for tenants which will be released later this summer.

Zumper has raised $1 million in seed funding from Kleiner Perkins, Andreessen Horowitz, NEA, and Crunchfund. It is based in San Francisco.