Kyle
If you’ve ever been apartment shopping online, you know what a pain in the ass it can be. You’re browser usually has 99 tabs open and your going back and forth trying to get as much info as possible. If you’re organized, perhaps you made a spread sheet or kept notes. Well New York startup Rentenna is making lives easier for those shopping for apartments and rentals in New York City, Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Fort Worth, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Portland, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, Tacoma and Washington DC. They’re expanding at lightning speed so if you’re city isn’t available now it should be soon.
Between the three cities Rentenna have over 100,000 buildings listed in their platform. From there everything you would ever want to know about the apartment building is rated into one simple score 1-99 so you can quickly find the best bang for your buck.
Rentenna offers information open rental units from a variety of rental partners,giving users options for available listings. They also offer in depth reviews from their partner Block Avenue.
The startup was co-founded by a powerhouse team including Alicia Scwartz a young serial entrepreneur who’s credits include thecareerproject.org and howtorentinNYC.com. She is also a former New York Times rental expert. We got a chance to talk with Schwartz about Rentenna. Check out the interview below.
What is your startup, what does it do?
Rentenna’s data-driven rental search is the fastest & most beautiful way to find an apartment you’ll love. Our technology analyzes millions of data points on buildings and neighborhoods, and then compresses that information into a Rentenna Score of 0-100 to help you quickly sort through available listings and decide if a rental building is someplace you’d like to live.
Who are the founders and what are their backgrounds
Alicia Schwartz is a former rental broker, former New York Times Rental Expert, and a digital marketing consultant to the real estate industry.
A. Kayvon Bina studied Human-Computer Interaction at Stanford University before advising technology & media companies on Wall Street and then co-founding his first successful startup, FranchiseHelp.com.
Sandeep Kella studied engineering at UMichigan, was a Private Equity investor, and has co-founded 2 successful startups (including FranchiseHelp.com w/ Kayvon).
Kevin Dolan, Rentenna’s CTO, studied Computer Science at Cornell. Before Rentenna, Kevin built the search product at Workday (NYSE: WDAY).
Where are you based?
Rentenna is based in the WeWork Labs incubator space in SoHo, New York City.
What is the startup culture like where you are based?
New York overall has a thriving startup culture, with an ecosystem that’s benefited immensely from successful NYC entrepreneurs paying it forward by subsequently becoming mentors and investors to local startups. Our incubator space specifically (WeWork Labs) is an amazing launching pad from which to build a technology company many of our most important contacts and partnerships have emerged from the informal network fostered in the halls at WeWork.
What problem does your startup solve?
Rental search today is an awful experience. Current sites are no better than skimming through classifieds in the paper — line after line of basically identical listings, with no guidance or information to help you find the apartments you might actually want to live in. We use the power of data — data on buildings, on landlords, on rent prices, on neighborhoods, on local bars/restaurants, and more — to help you quickly find the rentals that best match your priorities as a renter.
What is one challenge that you’ve overcome in the startup process?
Whenever you’re addressing a major consumer pain point, you’re sure to get an endless stream of (often totally contradictory) feature requests that users believe would solve their problems. If you’re too reactive to that kind of feedback, you’ll end up building an unwieldy product that doesn’t really solve anyone’s problems particularly well. We’ve been disciplined from the very beginning about using qualitative feedback to identify users’ biggest pain points while using a rigorous A/B testing framework to select the solutions (features) that best solve those problems.
What are some of the milestones your startup has achieved?
We’ve built a massive database of over 100,000 buildings indexed, nearly a million listings processed, and over 70 million discrete data points analyzed — all powering a beautiful site that was just recognized as a 2013 Webby Awards Honoree in the Real Estate category!
What are your next milestones
Over the coming months we’ll be identifying and incorporating additional city-specific data sources, testing a bevy of new features, and releasing our mobile app / tablet experience.
Who are your mentors and role models?
Each of the founders at Rentenna has been lucky to work with tremendous mentors throughout his/her career. While there are many successful entrepreneurs whom we admire and turn to for advice on Rentenna, it’s the people we’ve worked with throughout our careers who have shaped us most.
What are some of the advantages/disadvantages growing your startup outside of Silicon Valley.
The advantage of growing outside Silicon Valley is being in New York, a city we love and which happens to have a startup and investor community that fits well with Rentenna’s business model.
The disadvantage of growing outside Silicon Valley is missing out on those serendipitous connections that get made every day there thanks to the area’s sheer concentration of successful tech entrepreneurs, investors, and advisors. Plus, it means Kayvon doesn’t get to go back to Stanford and stroll down Palm Drive nearly as often as he’d like.
What’s next for your startup?
We’re new, but we’ve resonated with consumers because we’re offering a product that’s unlike any the rental search category has seen before. Our next challenge is to expose Rentenna to as broad an audience as possible, so every apartment-hunter can have the fast & beautiful apartment search experience we think they deserve.
Where can people find out more, and what is your Twitter username?
People can use the site now at Rentenna.com. We are on Facebook and Twitter
