Welcome Jon Armitage, Our New COO

Jon Armitage is joining Apartment List as our Chief Operating Officer. I thought the better way to introduce Jon is to let you hear how he thinks.

This is part announcement, part Q&A. I’ll share why we’re excited to have Jon here, what this moment means for Apartment List, and, in a few places, have Jon answer directly in his own words.

Who is Jon?

Jon has spent his career building marketplaces that, underneath, look a lot like ours: businesses that only work when both sides are healthy at the same time. He was CMO and then CPO at Trivago, Chief Growth Officer at Gametime, and a marketing leader at Backcountry, Trunk Club, and Google. At Trivago he led the post-pandemic turnaround, taking the business from $250 million in revenue and losses to $535 million with over $100 million in EBITDA. Earlier in his career, he helped lead Trunk Club through 8x growth and a successful exit to Nordstrom.

Different categories, same hard problem every time. Create real value for two different sets of people at once, and keep doing it as you scale. That's the problem we work on every day, for renters and for property managers.

Why did you have conviction Jon was the right person?

His resume is impressive, but that's not the reason. It's how he thinks and leads. Jon understands that data and technology are the product, that behind every transaction is a person looking for a home, and that we have to protect and honor our customers in every decision we make. That's the part you can't teach.

I asked Jon what made Apartment List feel like the right next chapter.

Jon, why Apartment List?

"Plenty of companies talk about serving both sides of a market. Very few are built so they can only succeed when both sides do, the way Apartment List is. Marketplaces win by getting the fundamental value exchange right and compounding it for years. Apartment List has already done the hard part. A chance to help something like that reach its full potential doesn't come along often."

Why is now the right moment?

Matching renters to the right home is what we've always done. What's new is how much better we can do it. We have a much clearer view now of what renters need and what gets in their way. That lets us make the search feel easier for renters while helping property teams focus on the demand that is most likely to become a lease.

Property managers want more from us, and they're right to. They want partners who deliver leases, give them data they can actually use, and hand them tools to market themselves more successfully. That's what we do, and we're the only platform at our scale paid for an outcome rather than a click. The renter and the property manager are both our customers and the model only works when both of them come out ahead.

That alignment is also what stood out to Jon.

Jon, say more about that.

"Most rental platforms make money no matter what happens to the renter or the operator. Apartment List only wins when both of them win. That's rare and it's the entire point."

What's Jon going to focus on?

Near term, he's getting close to both sides of the marketplace, finding where the real friction is, and pointing our resources at what genuinely improves the experience on either side. The longer game is bigger: scale both sides of the platform at pace, compound our data and outcome advantage with every lease, and build the kind of growth engine that puts clear water between us and everyone else. The goal was never just to grow faster. It's to become the obvious place to find a home and the obvious partner to fill one.

We have the structural advantages, we have the model that aligns everyone's incentives, and now we have Jon. We're in a far stronger position today than we were yesterday.

Welcome, Jon. Glad you're here.