As the line between short and long-term grows murkier, Zumper, a rental search site, has woven Airbnb listings and other short-term rentals into its search experience.
“This is what today’s millennial renter is demanding, and Zumper is the place where they can find every kind of listing, whether a month to month rental, or a full on annual lease,” said Zumper CEO Anthemos Georgiade in a statement.
Leveraging its acquisition of PadMapper, Zumper has also expanded to Canada, adding hundreds of thousands of listings north of the U.S. border.
Zumper claims to be the “largest startup” in the rental space with “several million unique visitors,” has raised $20 million in funding and offers rental search and property-management tools.
Zumper.com search results page shows short-term rental listings from Airbnb (bottom) and other sources (top).
The short-term rental race
Like some other rental startups, such as RadPad, Zumper wants to help renters through every step of the search process. Along those lines, it lets renters submit applications with credit reports on some listings.
Signing monthly leases or longer leases that run for less than 12 months has become increasingly popular, as Airbnb has popularized short-term rentals and spurred landlords to try renting out once-long-term units on a temporary basis, Jonathan Eppers, CEO of RadPad, told Inman when the Zumper competitor recently introduced lease-signing on its site.
RadPad began catering to this behavioral shift by publishing listings from onefinestay, a marketplace for high-end short-term rentals. And it’s talking to Airbnb about doing the same.
Zumper has apparently beaten its competitor to the punch.
If users choose to search short-term listings alone or alongside long-term inventory on Zumper (the listings don’t appear by default), they will see Airbnb listings advertised with monthly rates — even though though those units might also be available for a shorter booking on Airbnb.
While Airbnb listings seem to comprise the vast bulk of Zumper’s short-term inventory, Airbnb listings appear to show up in search results below listings from other sources, including HomeSuite, a corporate month-to-month housing provider.
Perhaps that’s because, unlike short-term listings from non-Airbnb sources, listings in Zumper search results pages link directly to airbnb.com. They can’t be viewed on zumper.com.
Realtor.com and RealStir are other property search sites that have sought to capitalize on growing interest in short-term rentals.
For a time, realtor.com sprinkled Airbnb listings into search results and property pages (it appears to have stopped). RealStir lets homesellers add a short-term rental option to a for-sale listing so buyers can test out their home.
Zumper’s Canadian listings come from direct relationships with landlords and through Zumper’s free landlord posting tool, Zumper Pro. The Canadian App and Play Stores featured Zumper’s Apple and Android apps, respectively, when they launched, according to Zumper.
Zumper acquired PadMapper, what Zumper said was the first map-based search platform in the U.S. and Canada, in February, a move that presaged its official expansion into Canada.
