Lovely aggregates rental listings from over 100 data sources and allows direct postings, positioning itself as an end-to-end platform for renters and landlords. The site processes over 1.5 million rental listings each month and helps roughly 500,000 people find new homes monthly; its iOS app has nearly 250,000 downloads and Lovely Pro counts about 5,000 property owners. Lovely has added services beyond listings, including applicant credit vetting via a partnership with Experian and the ability for users to apply directly through the site. The company is expanding its service stack to cover the full lifecycle for landlords and renters by integrating payments and property management tools. As part of that strategy, Lovely acquired Rentmatic to add rent-payment processing and to migrate Rentmatic’s customers and platform onto Lovely. The Series A (amount undisclosed) and the Rentmatic deal are intended to fund U.S. expansion and product integration. Lovely is a map-focused apartment search platform that aggregates rental listings from Craigslist and a growing set of other sources (12 providers at launch). It expanded nationwide after a late-2011 mini-launch in San Francisco and select regions, where up to 100,000 people used the service monthly. Core product features include a “renter’s resume,” direct landlord contact, real-time inventory availability, email alerts by parameters or street, and algorithms to deduplicate and parse listings. 3Taps supplies roughly one-third of Lovely’s listings and also invested in the company. Lovely is developing visual search and automated photo processing, and it approaches rollout on a market-by-market basis to handle local data differences. Its current revenue model is per-lease commission with several data providers; it is beta-testing professional services for landlords in San Francisco and plans a public launch of those services and a new mobile app in the next few months.

Total raised

$2M

Funding rounds

2

Latest round

Seed

Latest activity

Oct 2012