Lovely: Making Apartment Hunting Less Painful

• May 21, 2012
• 4 Comments

by Shilpi Paul

Lovely

Tired of scrolling through the minimalist, black and white Craigslist interface when searching for an apartment? The website Lovely is making the process more colorful and intuitive for DC apartment hunters. Taking a page from Redfin and Trulia, who use maps to organize data on available homes for purchase, the site at livelovely.com recently launched in the nation’s capital.

To search, you choose a city, street or neighborhood, filter the choices by price, number of bedrooms and pet friendliness and up pops a map with pointers on the available units. (The newest listings are highlighted in red.) Lovely has been operating in San Francisco since late 2011.

Lovely can also help potential renters stand out to landlords. When users sign up, they have the opportunity to fill out a “rental resume” with their impressive renter stats, which the site uses to let them know when apartments in a desired price range and neighborhood pop up; there is also a system that allows users to to email landlords directly.

Right now, many of the listings have been scraped from Craigslist and Trulia. Lovely hopes to allow landlords to post directly to the site soon.

The site is similar to Trulia’s rental offering, Padmapper, and a few other sites. With all these competitors, it seems like Craigslist’s status as the primary apartment hunt destination may soon be in jeopardy.

This article originally published at http://dc.urbanturf.com/articles/blog/lovely_making_apartment_hunting_less_painful/5564

4 Comments

1. Geori said at 8:58 pm on Monday May 21, 2012:
   How do they make money? Do they sell "renter resumes" as leads to owners?

1. Blake said at 9:19 pm on Monday May 21, 2012:
   Hi Geori, Blake here from LiveLovely.com. No, we don't (and never will) sell any of our user data. The purpose of the Renter Resume is purely to help renters organize their information and to help them prepare for in-person meetings with landlords - essentially, it's something we wish we had when we were applying for apartments in DC and SF. As far as a revenue model goes, we have a few different things in the works relating to apartment applications and other landlord tools. Our primary goal, however, was to build a better search tool for renters, so that's where we started. Our website will always be free for renters.

1. Matt said at 11:13 pm on Monday May 21, 2012:
   Padmapper.com does basically the same thing and has been around for a while. I've used it to find my last couple of apartments.

1. faraji whalen said at 11:36 pm on Thursday May 24, 2012:
   Blake: I have a Property Management company and we're naturally interested in anything that could help broaden our listing exposure. I see a couple of our listings on the site which is encouraging, and the functionality is pretty good. Are you planning to offer any additional functionality or features for landlords?