Zumper Acquires PadMapper
tl;dr: We acquired Padmapper; they are awesome; we did 4 million visits in Jan (graphs if you scroll); we’ll do 8–10 million monthly visits in summer; we’ll be profitable this year; we’ll make renting your home as easy as booking a hotel.
I first felt the pain of apartment hunting while at college at Oxford in the UK. My undergrad friends and I found the perfect apartment, only to be told by the property manager that we had to offer a higher rent to beat another interested party. After a few days of playing their game, we realized we were being played against another group of friends who were being told exactly the same thing. Neither group had initially offered anything above asking price. The lack of transparency in the process was being used by the agent to bid up the price.
When I moved to the U.S. in 2009, I fell flat one stage even earlier in the process. Just finding a comprehensive selection of easily browsable listings was difficult. I tried many solutions but kept coming back to one platform, one that I later found out was, at the time, both built and run by one person: PadMapper, and Eric DeMenthon (YC S10).
To me, and — as it turns out — to the more than 50 million unique renters who have used it since launch, PadMapper was the simplest, most unbiased rental search platform in North America. It was also a revolutionary approach to UX, the first mash-up of Google Maps and listing pins that I can remember seeing at scale. Now commonplace, it’s incredible to recall that this paradigm was almost unique at the time.
And so it is with great excitement that we can today announce that Zumper has acquired PadMapper and will continue to run and enhance its product as a fully-owned subsidiary.
We have been joined at Zumper HQ in San Francisco by PadMapper’s CEO & Founder Eric DeMenthon, and its CTO Rob Crowell, who have been close friends since their college days at MIT.
We are excited to re-launch their search products today across all of iOS, Android and web. You will also notice a new logo, which was designed to encapsulate the trusted and playful nature of the PadMapper brand.
Eric and I first met in early 2014 when Zumper had just raised its Series A from Goodwater Capital and Kleiner Perkins. We briefly discussed an acquisition then, but the two platforms were too imbalanced for it to be possible. Although Zumper had successfully focused on monetization early on, and had built a great product for landlords through our now industry-leading Zumper Pro tool, we were still small on the consumer side. We were too young. The math didn’t work yet.
Eighteen months on in summer 2015, when Zumper started doing millions of uniques a month, the time was right to try again. Over several coffees and dinners, Eric and I discovered that we shared the same vision for the future of our industry: a high-touch, lifecycle relationship with renters, not just ditching them after they send their first messages to landlords, as all other major rental platforms do today. We both wanted to fix that problem I’d encountered at college: online search was just the beginning of a renter’s pain; applying, locking the apartment down and signing a lease was an equally poor and non-transparent experience. We decided that, together, we could roll out a solution more quickly, and to a much larger audience.
It was ultimately time to grow big, overnight.
And here’s a snapshot of what that means today.
Zumper, on its own, grew its consumer audience into the millions of monthly visits pretty quickly since launch at TechCrunch Disrupt in September 2012 (dips are seasonal).
And here’s what our joint platform graph looks like with PadMapper on board since January. This is what happens when you combine a growth obsession with a calculated short-cut. We are now the largest startup in the rental space, with the smallest team.
The Zumper & PadMapper platform:
- saw 4 million visits this January;
- will see 8–10 million visits per month this summer, meaning that most people who move in the US this year will use Zumper and/or PadMapper during their search;
- will likely be profitable by the end of summer.
And all this with under 30 wonderfully talented & ambitious people on our team.
What’s next for PadMapper? They are the single most trusted brand across college campuses in the U.S. and Canada, and we plan to build on that. They are also a fantastic platform on which to build short-term rentals and roommate searches. We will also include our rental application product, Instant Apply, into their flow later this year.
And yet, none of this is enough. This is just the beginning.
We believe that renting your next home should be as easy as booking a hotel.
Right now, Zumper and soon PadMapper users can do this in a self-serve way through our application and tenant screening feature. Zumper’s Instant Apply tool, launched in 2014, was the first ever product that let renters pull their credit, eviction and criminal reports from an iOS or Android app, and then submit their application securely to the landlord during an open house from their phones. This gives our renters that all important edge while other applicants are rushing home to print off the paperwork. Every month, thousands of renters successfully apply with Zumper from their phones, and this number is growing very, very quickly.
But to deliver the very best, Virgin America-grade, customer experience to renters, we need to go one step further.
In the coming months, Zumper and PadMapper will launch a new product — currently in beta — that will serve renters in a much more hands-on way. We will treat renters like human beings, not leads, with the ambition of transforming the rental industry from the ground up.
We can’t wait to show you what we’re working on.
Eric, Rob: it’s so good to have you with us. Congratulations on an amazing journey. Welcome to the Zumper family.
Let’s build something great.
Anthemos
Zumper CEO
