A New Shape for Renting Starts Today

Somewhere right now, a person is looking for an apartment. She's been at it for weeks. Fourteen tabs open. A listing that may or may not still be available, at a price that may or may not be the real price, in a neighborhood she's never set foot in. She's trying to figure out from six photos whether this is a place where her life could happen. She doesn't know what the fees will be. She doesn't know if she'll like the commute. And she's doing all of it on a Tuesday night, after work, because no one ever really set out to solve this for her.

That's who we've been building for since the start. I've thought about this renter, or someone like her, almost every day since I joined Apartment List nearly a decade ago.

Renters Have Outgrown the Old System

More than 40% of Americans rent. Most will rent again. Many will rent for the rest of their lives. The share of Americans who rent is growing, and it is not going back. The American Dream is changing, whether that's the cost of housing or the pull of renting itself. The apartment someone lives in is part of who they are. It's where they recover, where they reset, where they decide what kind of life they want. Renting is not a waiting room for homeownership. It's how a large and growing share of America actually lives. The industry has always treated that as a transaction. We've always treated it as life.

Search Still Leaves Too Much Work to Renters

Most people still scroll through hundreds of listings. Some are wrong. Some are out of date. Platforms get paid whether you found an apartment or not, so the incentive is to show you more listings, not better ones. We thought that was backwards. Apartment List asks renters what they're looking for and matches them to apartments that fit. Millions of people have found their home this way and we'll keep making it better, because most renters still start their search the way they always have.

But matching a renter to the right options is not the same as finding them a home. Renters are still the ones comparing neighborhoods. Weighing tradeoffs. They still do all the work.

Meet Kaleno: Your Apartment Search, Handled

So we built something that does the work. Some would call it agentic. We call it Kaleno. It doesn't hand you hundreds of listings. It goes and looks, the way someone who knows you well would, weighing what you've said and what you haven't, and comes back with options worth your time. Most renters don't want more listings. They want fewer, better ones, chosen by something that understands them.

Apartment List is the best way to search. Kaleno is the first product that searches for you.

Meet Sunny: A Better Deal for Renters

Then there's the part of renting nobody talks about. The money. Renters in the US pay more than $600B in rent every year. On top of that come the fees: application fees, admin fees, amenity fees, pet fees, parking fees, utility setup. Most renters can't tell you what they'll actually pay before they sign. A lot of them can't tell you after, either.

Sunny shows the true cost of an apartment before you sign. It surfaces fees other platforms hide. It puts cash back in renters' pockets when they sign through Sunny. And it'll do more over time, because the financial reality of renting doesn't end at the lease signing and neither should the support.

Our Model Has Always Built Around Renters Finding Home

We can do this because of how our business is built. Apartment List is the only rental platform that gets paid per lease, not per listing and not per click. We make money when a renter signs a lease they actually want to sign. That means the renter, the property manager, and the platform all win at the same time.

A decade ago, the idea that a rental platform could get paid only when renters actually signed sounded like a bad business. We built the company around it anyway. Today it's the reason we can build Kaleno and Sunny at all. You can now explore Kaleno to see how we’re handling the search for renters, and Sunny to see how we’re helping renters find more value when they sign.

The person looking on a Tuesday night just needs to find a home she loves. That's what we set out to do the day we started. Every product, every hire, every decision since has been in service of her.