Realtor.com is now set up to get rental listings from pros who use the rental marketplace Zumper to market their listings.
Zumper has over half a million listings on its platform that it gets from multiple channels, said Zumper CEO Anthemos Georgiades. But only listings that Zumper receives from real estate professionals through its free “Zumper Pro” program are part of the new feed to realtor.com. Zumper also syndicates listings to Trulia.
Zumper will be adding other rental sites to join Trulia and realtor.com in the “Zumper Leads Network” in the coming months, Georgiades said.
In a conference call with investors Tuesday, Steve Berkowitz, CEO of realtor.com operator Move Inc., said realtor.com is “in the early stages” of building out its rentals business.
Berkowitz said that rental listings were up 77 percent from a year ago during the second quarter, and 11 percent from the first quarter. That increase helped grow realtor.com’s rental audience by 62 percent from a year ago, he said.
Move has an exclusive agreement with the National Association of Realtors to operate realtor.com dating back to 1996. Last July, NAR approved amendments to the operating agreement that allowed realtor.com to begin hosting rental listings not represented by Realtors.
Realtor.com will release a rentals-focused iPad app sometime in the third quarter and is working on an Android version, Berkowitz said. This week the company will announce the inclusion of rentals on the Doorsteps Swipe iPhone app.
“Realtor.com is collaborating with Zumper because of Zumper’s national scope as a leading mobile, rental listing posting tool and its focus on providing people with high-quality rental information, which corresponds to our focus on accuracy,” said Todd Callow, Move’s senior director of rentals category management, in a statement.
Zumper, which launched nationwide last year and raised $6.5 million in a funding round in March, has its eye on becoming the leader in the rental marketplace.
That goal just became even more challenging now that Zillow plans to buy Trulia, Georgiades said. Like realtor.com, Zillow and Trulia are in the process of building out their rental marketplaces.
“It’s a double-headed goliath,” Georgiades said of the merger of the real estate giants, which is expected to close next year. But he sees it as an opportunity for Zumper. “While they spend a year integrating, we’ll be innovating,” he said.
Zumper has found that rental pros aren’t brand loyal and want to use multiple platforms to advertise their listings to make sure they’re getting the most leads, Georgiades said.
Zumper pros can upload listings to Zumper using the firm’s iPhone pro mobile app or its new pro Android mobile app, which launched today. The mobile apps connect to Zumper’s cloud-based database, so pros can also manage their listings seamlessly using a desktop computer, Georgiades said. (Zumper also has both Android and iOS consumer mobile apps.)
Zumper placed third among 15 firms who competed at Realogy’s second annual pitch competition, “FWD,” in June.