Our Story

More than one third of Americans are renters. Nationally, that’s nearly 100 million people spending hours and days scouring the web and pounding the pavement for apartments every time they move. It’s a time sucking, headache-filled process and a problem that (until now) hasn’t been solved online.

Apartment List’s founders John Kobs and Chris Herndon both felt this pain when they were working in finance and searching for apartments in Chicago and New York. Exhausted by bouncing from Craigslist to paid listings sites, meeting with brokers, and begging friends for recommendations, they decided there had to be a better way. As owners of rental properties in Cleveland and Austin, they both also knew the challenges of marketing a property and the financial burden of having it sit empty. Both sides of the transaction between renter and the listing agent/landlord were broken. In 2009, they quit their day jobs and moved to Silicon Valley to fix it.

Kobs and Herndon quickly raised angel funding from like-minded investors. They hired a team of star engineers from Google, Amazon, Yelp and Yahoo, and in 2011 the team launched apartmentlist.com which has become the fastest-growing apartment search engine on the Web. Apartment List helps 600,000 people every month in their housing search, and in 2012 it won the Webby Award in Real Estate (People’s Voice), among other accolades.

Similar to what Kayak does for travel, Apartment List delivers a comprehensive set of apartment listings in one elegant interface. By consolidating millions of properties from hundreds of well-known listing services, it uniquely delivers a universe of available apartments in one site, saving renters time and money in their search.

Consumers love the eye-popping next-generation maps, smart features that let you compare and share properties with friends, colorful neighborhood information like ‘Walkability’ and ‘Stroller Index’ scores, and local scoop from Yelp (not to mention our adorable robot). Agents, landlords and listing services get their properties discovered by great tenants and fill vacancies faster.

Apartment List is aggressively hiring team members with a shared vision to rebuild the rental market based on a foundation of trust and transparency.

Meet Our Team