Zumper, the Kleiner-backed apartment rental platform that launched at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2012, has acquired PadMapper, the popular map-centric apartment rentals site that was once embroiled in a prolonged legal fight with Craigslist.
The acquisition actually closed in January and the combined Zumper and PadMapper teams used the last few weeks to build updated versions of both PadMapper’s Android and iOS apps, as well as its desktop experience. Zumper is giving PadMapper’s logo a bit of a refresh, too. All of these updates are launching today.
Zumper will run PadMapper as a subsidiary that will keep its own structure, but over time, the two products will share the same backend.
The two companies declined to disclose the exact price of the acquisition, but Zumper co-founder and CEO Anthemos Georgiades tells me the price was under $10 million and included a mix of cash and stock. PadMapper never raised outside funding (it started as a student project that grew organically), so chances are company founder Eric DeMenthon still owns the majority share of it. DeMenthon and PadMapper CTO Rob Crowell have both joined Zumper.
Zumper CEO Georgiades tells me that he sees apartment search as only the first step in his company’s vision. What he really wants to build is a platform that makes renting an apartment as easy as booking a hotel room.
“The first couple of years, we just did the simple stuff,” he told me. That meant bringing the platform to the point where it could scale, for example.
Acquiring PadMapper means the combined platforms will have huge reach, too. Zumper says it saw 4 million visits in January 2016 and expects to get to 9 million monthly visits for the combined platforms by this summer. At this growth rate, the company expects to be profitable by the end of the summer.
With Zumper Pro, the company used to also push listings from its agents to other listing sites. “But with Zumper and PadMapper, we now have a closed loop and don’t need other,” Georgiades said.
Georgiades stressed that there is also virtually no overlap between the PadMapper and Zumper audience. PadMapper’s audience tends to skew younger and toward millennials, for example, Zumper attracts an older audience (with more money). “Everybody who looks for an apartment will touch our platforms,” Georgiades said.
The Zumper team tells me that the company has no interest in branching out to other real estate products that would compete with the likes of Zillow and Redfin, which mostly focus on home buying.
Instead, Georgiades is mostly driven by the idea of making renting easier. The company already offers Instant Apply, which makes it easier to apply for an apartment, but Georgiades tells me the company is also currently running “a private beta of higher-touch model which allows renters to book apartments.”