RentLingo Acquires Rental Listing Aggregator RoomHunt

RentLingo, an apartment review and listing site that launched in 2012, today announced that it has acquired RoomHunt, a service that also aggregates listings, but with a focus on helping you find roommates for those listings. The acquisition actually closed last December, but the two companies decided to keep it under wraps until now.

RoomHunt launched just over two years ago. While it got a bit of buzz, things remained pretty quiet around the service while the existing online real estate services like Zillow started taking the rental market more seriously during the real estate downturn.

With these large companies in the rental market, RentLingo also faces stiff competition, but it looks like it’s on the right track. The company says it saw about 100,000 unique hits in all of 2013, but by the end of 2014, it was already seeing 150,000 uniques per month. Total apartment inquires are also now up to 85,000 compared to 5,000 in 2013.

RentLingo co-founder Dan Laufer tells me that he believes the company’s core focus on expert reviews (that is, former property managers that actually tour the properties) gives the company a leg up.

“While obviously Zillow/Trulia entering rentals is significant, we see ourselves as complementary and not directly competitive (similar to a TripAdvisor/Kayak relationship),” he told me in an email today.

The two companies did not disclose any financial details, but RentLingo tells me that it doesn’t plan to integrate RoomHunt’s roommate search features “in the near term.”