Scaling Apartment List As A Leading Rental Marketplace With Matthew Woods | EM Group Chat #185

Welcome back to Everything Marketplaces, where we talk with founders and leaders from some of today's top marketplaces. So this is episode 185, which is a really great group chat that we just had with Matthew Woods, who's the CEO of Apartment List. Apartment List is one of the largest marketplaces for apartment rentals. It's also been mentioned as one of the fastest growing rental marketplaces, and they've raised over $150 million in capital from top investors. So this is a great chat with Matthew. We're going back to the early stages of Apartment List and some of the challenges. We got to learn more about how it's evolved and scaled. Did a deep dive into his leading marketplace for apartment rentals today. Got to learn more about their growth, how they're leveraging AI. Matthew shared lots of tips for founders building in real estate and housing. We also had a great group Q&A. I really enjoyed this conversation, and you're going to find it a great watch to the end. So Matthew, you've been highly requested a group chat guest for a while now, and I'm really excited to have you join us here today. Want to start off by saying huge thanks for taking the time to do so in advance. We have a lot that we're going to dive into with all of your experience at Scaling Apartment List, but I thought it'd be great if you can start off by briefly sharing your background for those here that might not know you.

Yeah, Mike, thanks. I'm super excited to be here. Follower of the community myself, and so I'm inspired by this crew. So brief background on me. I'm Matthew Woods. I'm the CEO of Apartment List, which is a large two-sided rentals marketplace. I've been at the company for 8 years, so I'm a non-founder CEO. I joined leading our go-to-market functions and have had success at the business and stepped into CEO 3 years ago as our incredible founder, John Cobbs, went out to start his next venture. For me, this is act 2 in my career. So in full disclosure, I am not a lifetime marketplace leader. I spent the first 15 years of my career in clean tech, We built a large solar energy business, large publicly traded residential solar energy company. And after spending my career in pursuit of clean tech, I was just mesmerized by the opportunity to take a leadership role in a marketplace business. And that's what brought me to Apartment List.

That's an awesome background. Thanks for sharing with us on that. And so, you know, what initially kind of led you to Apartment List? And now what were some of the initial challenges when you first joined?

Great question, Mike. So, I think it's important, Mike, that I, as I'm constantly reflecting on this journey, I think we all know building a marketplace is hard. It's challenging. And so what brought me here is really, to be quite honest with you, Mike, the same thing that keeps me here. When I was contemplating what to do next in my career, I was looking for kind of 4 core pillars in my next Opportunity. One, I wanted to go to work for a company with a mission that mattered. Personally, I have 3 kids, and I wanted to be able to talk about what we were doing every day in a way that we were changing the world to be better. 2, I wanted to go to battle with a great group of people. The A-listers, as we call it, is like so paramount to who we show up and how we show up every day. I spend more time working than I do just about anything else. So I wanted to do it with great, highly talented people. 3, I wanted to work on and with a product that could win. I am wildly competitive and I wanted to be able to go to market with a product that I thought could do something really disruptive, make people's lives better and win in this space. And last but not least, I wanted to be in a position that actually moved the needle and Joining this company provided a lot of those opportunities, and same reason I joined eight years ago is the same reason I'm here today. On the mission front, Mike, you know I moved ten times in twelve years. Four of those moves were with three kids under six years old, and I just came to understand that renting is hard. And if we could really solve that renter journey in a way that was wildly different than anyone else. We would be doing so much good and it would personally impact me. And it's been an incredible run.

That's awesome. I think the pain point definitely resonates with a lot of us here. So you got some head nods. And I guess when you first joined, could you share maybe what point of the business was that and some of those initial kind of challenges?

Yeah, I'll be pretty just transparent with where we are on this journey. And as we jump into the questions, know that I'm willing to lean in on a lot of the hard issues and I'll, I'll keep some of the stuff sensitive and topical, if you will. But otherwise, like, I think it's important to just like all share collectively how we build together. So Apartment List, very quickly, 2-sided rentals marketplace. In order to be successful in a marketplace, as you all know, we have to have supply and demand. For us, the supply is apartment communities. The demand is prospective renters. When I joined the business coming up 8 years ago, we were about a fifth of the size that we are today. And so we were still trying to become relevant, if you will. We were competing against incredible industry competitors like Zillow and CoStarApartments.com. And the number one charter that we had is we had to go get and acquire supply. Supply, meaning apartment communities. And we had to go to those apartment communities, those owners and operators, and convince them that what we were doing was different than everybody else because we didn't invent this category. We came to disrupt the category. And I think that's really important to understand because it defined how we went to market. It defined the value prop that we needed to take to market. So early challenges for us. How do we accelerate supply acquisition? I'll jump into that if you want later, Mike, and how we did it through our offering. 2, how do we compete in a market that is really driven by performance marketing, really expensive customer acquisition in a way that our balance sheet could support as an up-and-coming venture-backed business? So early days, it was like core marketplace fundamentals. And as we have grown and matured over time, It's really been a natural extension of that and us getting smarter and more proficient in how we go to market.

You mentioned lots of great topics here. I guess if we start with supply, so how did you kind of, I would say, initially kind of acquire and scale up the supply side?

Yeah, great question. So the business model for Apartment List is uniquely different than any of our peer competitors. We are a success-based marketplace, and in the rental ecosystem, That's really hard. And hard how? Because renters, normally when they are searching for a place to live, probably do what any of you would do. Mike, you and I were just riffing on the fact that you may be looking for a place to live. And, you know, you generally go into Google and Google apartments for rent, enter city name. So at first, as we were kind of building the business, we needed to go and acquire enough supply in select markets that when a renter hit Apartment List, there was a relevant supply choice. Otherwise, the marketplace broke down before the search even started. It's like a dating app. If you go and there's 3 potential partners, gosh, once you get through those 3, like game over, you have to move on. So we started really in focusing on 7 core markets in the US. So imagine this, we go to the largest owners and operators, we tell them we have this incredible product, this marketplace we want you to put all of your supply on. But OPS, we're only operating in a few select markets. So, but we did that in a way in order to get concentration in market so that we could have relevance, we could have match, we could acquire demand against it. in a super efficient way. So for us, this business has always been kind of on the front foot of supply acquisition as our driver of success. When you think about a two-sided marketplace, and it started with 7 core markets, then it expanded basically every 3 years to now where we're across the US.

We'll probably get to the expansion here in a little bit, but that's definitely great to hear. And then also too, I believe instead of focusing on the individual landlords, you also I believe you partner with— was it the property management?

That is right. So when you think about the rental ecosystem in the US, our business started by simply going after the largest-scale owners and operators of conventional multifamily. And the simple reason behind that, Mike, is they had the scale. It's afforded us the ability to make one sales call, if you will, And acquire a significant amount of supply versus going property by property.

And then as far as if we jump over to the consumer side, right? So on the renters, I think it's also worth noting that you have a matching experience as well, right? So could you maybe share a little bit more about that and maybe how that matching experience and process has evolved?

Yeah, absolutely. So the Apartment List search and discovery experience is pretty different. We focus on building a highly curated and customized renter journey. You know, there's a lot of options if you're looking for a place to rent and you Google apartment for rent. Like, there's a bunch of marketplaces that provide a traditional marketplace experience. Go see a ton of inventory, kind of scroll through it on your own, figure out what is the most efficient match for you, and enter the discovery experience. For us, we decided that in order for us to differentiate in the market and in order for us to get paid when we successfully deliver a renter to a community, we needed to rethink that search and discovery experience. So when you land on Apartment List, renters go through a quiz that really helps us curate their search for them. And the reason is, is what we have found is When most renters start their search and discovery journey, they actually don't know exactly what they want, or they know exactly what they want, but they're not actually sure if there's anything relevant in the market they're going after. We use the perfect example of we're a virtual-first company now, but we're a Bay Area-based business. You know, people start their search in San Francisco and they say, I want a 2-bedroom place, onsite laundry, underground parking, view of the Golden Gate Bridge for $1,500 a month. And we're like, yikes, that doesn't exist. But as opposed to telling you that doesn't exist, we really guide the renter through that search and discovery. So, Mike, yeah, we have a very curated experience. It means that we drive renters to a very refined funnel. But the outcome of that is They end up with the place they love in a much more efficient way than they would actually have done on their own if they tried to figure out their own search experience.

Yeah, I would say open search and discovery versus kind of matching is something that we're talking about here frequently in the community. So I guess on that note, do you have maybe any kind of tips for founders as far as that are thinking about that and like what the best experience might be?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's really highly dependent on The marketplace one is building, you know, renting. You think about the nuances of renting. One, it's super personal. Where you live matters. I mentioned I moved 10 times in 12 years. That was all renting. I mean, we were bringing home new kids, new marriage, first steps, all taking place in our home. Renting is super personal. Therefore, people are willing to invest more time and energy into it. Number 2, it's episodic. You only rent every couple of years. So when you think about building the virality of bringing people back to your marketplace, we basically get one shot every 2 years. So our experience better be great. Unlike other amazing marketplaces, I'm on a car app marketplace 7 to 10 times a week. One kind of funky driver experience doesn't change my entire perspective of the marketplace. In our business, it does. So in, in, in what we were looking to build, Mike, specifically to your question, it was really important for us that we took the factors of the decision criteria into play as we decided the experience we wanted for our consumers. The reason we built matching versus open search and discovery is We knew that in order to win, we needed to provide a better outcome for the renter, a more qualified lead or renter for the property, and just a more seamless experience. And that's why we designed what we did, and it's seen some great, great success along the way.

Yeah. So you mentioned that frequency. So are there maybe any specific kind of challenges and also learnings as well with you know, apartmentless is a little bit lower frequency in nature of marketplace.

You're absolutely correct. This is a low-frequency marketplace. However, the idea of moving and the hobby mentality of searching for the next place to live is much higher frequency than the actual move. Imagine how much time many of us spend on the weekends, either A, searching for our next vacation and finding ourselves on a great marketplace like Airbnb, daydreaming of what a trip to Mexico City might look like. The same is true in this. People that are renting are often thinking about what could be next. So although the transaction is low frequency, the consideration is much higher frequency. So in our particular instance, what we did and what we built with Apartment List is we built a lot of drip campaigns in terms of how we communicate with renters. Hey Mike, we know you were looking at said property on the west side of LA. There's a new rent special you should consider. There's a new amenity that you should consider. It's been 12 months since you last looked. Let's bring you back. So last year, close to 40% of the transactions on our marketplace were from reactivated users, users that hadn't actually been on platform for more than 6 months. And that is really through how we are engaging with those renters in between episodes and with that frequency in order to bring them back to play. So I would really encourage folks to think about, one, what is the frequency of the transaction for the marketplace that you're building? 2, if it is lower frequency, how do you engage inter-episode such that it is not a brand new acquisition and search and discovery experience when they do reenter for that next consideration.

Those are going to be great tips. And you mentioned earlier, as far as like if you kind of go back to the earlier stages, right, those initial kind of like 7 markets that you focused on. Yeah. So I would say like, you know, when it comes to like expansion and growth, you know, could you maybe share more about that?

Yeah, absolutely. So let me give you a, like a super simple example. One of our 7 markets that we first went after was Denver. So in early days, our goal was how do we acquire as much possible supply apartment communities in Denver? And that was like very grassroots, literally showing up at property buildings with a half dozen donuts and saying, hey, we're Apartment List, we're different. Please list your property on our platform for free. And only pay us when we deliver success. So early days, we basically had this North Star, Mike, of we wanted to get to 40% market penetration in before we thought about the next new markets to pursue. Because when we think about like the network effects in our business, when you start to get to 40% supply, and for simple terms, like supply is There were 100 apartment communities. We had 40 of them. We start to see the network effects really take hold. Match rate for renters goes through the roof. Match rate improves our ability to acquire net new demand because our ARPU goes up, our revenue per users go up, and that really accelerates the flywheel. So the first 40% of supply acquisition for us in market are like the golden days and the hardest lift. But once we are able to accomplish that, the next 30 or 40% starts to see really like maximum network effects take hold. So for us, early days, it was very, very myopic and we must get supply density in these 7 markets. And once we do that, we'll then expand to the next. And that's how we went through that sales motion. And even though we're much larger today, hundreds of people, across the country and in Israel and Canada, the original market penetration still follows the exact same playbook.

That's really interesting to learn about. So yeah, thanks for sharing with us on that. And then you mentioned that the kind of the team, you know, so what is the team like today and kind of like the work structure as a marketplace?

Yeah, great. Thanks for asking. It's something I probably am most excited about. You know, I think people make this business the success that it is. We're really fortunate. Apartment List is not a brand new business. We've been around since 2011. And what's incredible is we have A-listers that have been here for almost the entire journey, which is unheard of in like the tech venture-backed marketplace. Apartment List has raised close to $170 million in venture. We're seeing now north of $100 million in revenue. Strong double-digit growth rate, even a positive, like all the financial metrics that you would want to see. But in order to go through that evolution from scrappy startup, like struggling to catch your footing to scale marketplace is quite a journey. Today we have about 230 folks that are across the US. We bought an AI business in Tel Aviv a few years back. which is an incredible technical engineering team with a really strong winning go-to-market play through our AI business. And we're starting to expand into Canada with our talent as well. So business, when you think about organizational design, we have your traditional, like what you would say is like marketplace, like organizational kind of constructs, big growth organization, really switched on product and engineering team that's really fixated on We call it the lister supply and the renter kind of experience. We have a big supply acquisition team, a sales org that is focused on going after and acquiring the next new property to put on our platform. So if you looked at our org chart, it looks pretty traditional. I think what's atypical is, A, the quality of talent and B, the tenure of talent that we have in our business.

Yeah, that's great to hear about the team. So cool. So you also mentioned that AI, and we couldn't have a conversation nowadays kind of without bringing up AI. So, you know, how are you leveraging AI at Apartment List?

Yeah, you're right. I feel like anytime we give an investor update, if we just put AI in either the title slide or somewhere in it, everyone feels more comfortable. The honest answer is we pursued AI way, way, way before AI was in vogue and all of the craze that it is today. I talked a little bit about that. We bring renters into our ecosystem. We take them through a quiz in order to basically really have a matching experience, and then we connect those renters with a property, an operator. So think of a leasing agent. I'm seeing some Karen on the call. Karen shows up on Apartment List. She goes through a quiz. Karen says, I'm going to I'm looking for a place in Atlanta, Georgia. We say, hey, Karen, these are all the places that match exactly what you're looking for. We ask Karen, do you want to connect with these properties? Basically a swipe right, swipe left type of experience. Karen says, yep, I want to connect with these 6 properties. We are now entirely dependent on a leasing agent to follow up with Karen in order to answer her questions To qualify her, to get her to move into the property, and that's our revenue. So imagine we've done all the work, thrown it into the oasis, and said, "Godspeed! Good luck, Karen! We sure hope someone follows up, gives you a great experience, and the entire lifeblood of our business is dependent on it." And that's a little scary, and it's fairly inconsistent, even though we have incredible supply partners. So the challenge for us is. How do we influence more of the renter experience in a very consistent way utilizing technology? Enter AI. So AI really solved a problem for us, and we were not looking for a solution to a problem that didn't exist. We were looking to solve the problem of this end-to-end renter experience. And so that is why we pursued and ultimately acquired an AI company That owned that renter experience. That has been kind of our AI journey today. Apartment List has around 7 million units on our platform and over 60 million registered users. AI today basically runs the user experience and influences the user experience on over two-thirds of that supply, 4 million properties. And is engaging with literally tens of millions of renter experience and episodes a month. And ultimately what it's doing is just making that into an experience. So to kind of full circle, now Karen says, I want this property in Atlanta, but Karen has a bunch of questions about said property. Will it allow my dog? What is the availability of the move-in? What's the proximity to the local Enter unique need. School, workplace, boba shop, coffee shop. Can you send me pictures of what my view will be out the window? What's the resident experience look like? All managed by AI, getting smarter and smarter. So we're leveraging across this, this across our ecosystem, and it's paying massive dividends. It's allowing us to convert our customers more efficiently and provide a richer experience.

Definitely think that marketplaces are uniquely positioned to leverage AI with all the kind of datasets.

So 100%.

Cool. So we're going to get into the group Q&A here. Otherwise, you and I could just continue to talk through things. But, you know, right before we do, as I kind of mentioned it to you right before we started recording, we have lots of, you know, founders here that are thinking about building in the kind of real estate and housing markets. So do you maybe have any tips for those that are?

Yeah, I mean, housing is One great industry to run after. You know, when I think about the things that I lay in bed and worry about at night, the total addressable market of prospective renters is not one of them. Whether or not there's enough supply and demand is not one of them. Whether or not the experience can be improved is not one of them. Housing is at the core of so much of the overall ecosystem, the economy, and the opportunity that we see, especially domestically. So One, I think it's a, a great segment to run after. I would just challenge the kind of the founders and builders here to be really selective in which side of the market they want to pursue and what problem they're trying to solve. There are a few probably places in the housing ecosystem that have enough new businesses running after it. I would look to carve out space that's untouched because there's still a ton of white space in the market.

Just give me great tips. So, well, cool. We're going to get into the group Q&A. Hey, Camila, do you want to come on? Saw you raise your hand.

Yes. Thank you so much for that valuable information, Matthew. This is really good. I've got a marketplace that is connecting engaged couples to elopement venues, and I have rolled out a quiz. So my question is, do you have Tips on the best way to roll out a quiz for that venue matching. And then you also mentioned the, the property managers that are the lifeblood of you getting to the revenue. Once they go through that quiz process, how are you tracking that lease has been made so that you guys can get paid? So that end-to-end rolling out the quiz and then getting paid as well. Thanks for the question. I heard it as in 2 parts. One is, how do you build like a matching experience, like a quiz for you in particular with engaged couples, potential locations like elopement, if you will? And 2, how do you get credit? In terms of the quiz and/or the matching experience itself, um, we have tested this over and over and over, and I would encourage you, A, start there. Like, literally, how many questions? What is the right question? What's the first question? What's the last question? What happens if a prospective customer or renter, in our case, couple in your case, drops out mid-quiz? How do you reactivate? How do you reengage? So I would really be thoughtful about what is the— like testing the experience in a way of what the entry point is for us. The entry point is right out of the gates. Camila, when are you looking to move? What city are you looking to move in? What are you looking for? Simple. Then a teaser and then a more thorough quiz search experience to refine. One, think about testing and evaluating. 2, in terms of how we get credit, Mike, I'll try to be succinct with these answers because I know we could go long, is we're fully integrated with the technology stack of all of these owners and operators, if you will. This is kind of our 10,000 hours problem where there are large owners and operators of apartment communities that are literally operating on almost 1,000 different iterations of technology. Think ERP systems, CRM systems, revenue management systems. And we have to connect all of those tech stacks in order to make sure that, Camila, when you show up and say, I'm registering with Apartment List, it flows all the way through to their rent roll and says, yep, Camila moved in. And yes, Apartment List was First, she engaged first with you. And so that has been like the biggest pursuit of like excellence that we have internally. And it's been the biggest challenge for any of our competition to replicate because a success-based marketplace is even harder to build than a subscription or SaaS marketplace where you every day have to demonstrate value delivery in order to have corresponding revenue of it.

Awesome. Those are great, great questions. Appreciate helping walk through the answers. So actually had a related question that I wanted to ask, and it was around the monetization, that kind of like, you know, success-based. So is that something that you kind of started with, you know, from the beginning at Apartment List or just kind of moved to?

Yeah, this has been a wild, wild experience. So no is the short answer. So our founder started this company in 2011, frustrated with an apartment search in New York City, said, I can do better. In the first 3 years of the business, this was like a metasearch business. We were literally basically buying keywords demand and reselling it to other real estate marketplaces. I mean, and when you think about this, like founder dilemma, builder dilemma, the company in 3 years was generating, went from $0 to $18 million in revenue. Pretty crazy scale for a metasearch platform. And then in 2014, they said, just kidding, we are going to now go upstream and compete because we don't think any of these businesses where we're selling our demand to are truly providing a great renter experience. It went from $18 million in revenue to zero and started the business back over again. And that was the critical pivot. And that is when we moved into a success-based marketplace. Now, we tested various different flavors of success. We tested success as a lead. Just pay us for a lead. We tested success. Just pay us for a tour. When someone else is on, Carly shows up and goes for a tour, you owe us $40. Then we said, you know what, let's actually go after what you care about, which is a renter moving into your property. And we went after the lease. So it went through 3 iterations of success before we got to the formula that we thought added the most defensible value.

That's really interesting. Appreciate you sharing with us on that. So monetization is always something that we're talking about. And, you know, at the earlier stages, there's lots of testing. So cool. Hey, Dimitri, do you want to come on?

I have a question for you about other low-frequency events that happen to renters. So things like going through some insurance claim or renewing your lease or maybe facing a rent increase. Or any kind of dispute with the landlord or the property management company.

Yeah.

Do you think they're like helping renters with these sort of low-frequency traumatic events is something that can make your marketplace more valuable? And if so, like, how would you think about sizing up this opportunity before you, you know, go out and you get all the engineers and the designers and everybody else to start building? Demetri, I smiled when you said traumatic event because oftentimes the idea of renting is a traumatic event.

Absolutely.

A good friend of mine, to that vein, you know, he's moved in the same— lived in the same apartment for literally 14 years and he doesn't have a couch. I'm like, hey, man, when are you going to buy a couch? He's like, I'm just not sure when I'm moving. And I'm like, you've been here 14 years. But it's like that renter dilemma of like, God, this was so hard and painful. I don't know that I have the gumption to do it again. Yet 14 years later, because you're fearful of what that next experience looks like, you still don't have a couch. So one, there are a bunch of low-frequency experiences with renting. Think about that renting experience. One, search and discovery, fairly low frequency. You then sign your lease, security deposit, first and last month's rent, renter's insurance. Setting up the utilities. Gosh, what a challenge that is! Like I need Wi-Fi and everything else. All of those play into the the renter dilemma, if you will. And so what we are seeing is we are seeing a lot of innovation around each of those spaces. The renewal process. How do you actually set up a renter's insurance product in a way that follows you? It's kind of crazy, Dimitri, but today you rent a property, you get renter's insurance, you move, you got to do it again. How can, like, you create a digital record of your renting experience? So when you think about how you size them up, which was the second part of your question, so I think there's opportunity there. B, when you think about sizing them up, I would really start to evaluate which of those points creates the most friction or pain, and which has the ability to, although it is low frequency today, move into kind of a no-frequency environment, meaning once it is set up, it is done, and it is no longer part of my consideration when I am moving the next time. So that's how I would look at it. And there's some cool innovation. There's a company called Flex that's doing innovation in rental payments. There's a company called Built doing innovation in rental rewards. There's a company, Renew, doing innovation in rental renewals. These are all unique businesses, not marketplaces, but businesses attacking like episodic components of the rental experience. Awesome.

Actually, the question I want to ask from a founder, they posted it in the chat, which is around specific channels and kind of strategies for demand generation. You know, they were asking, so for instance, you know, do you use like paid marketing and SEO? And like, if so, like programmatic SEO or kind of more towards like editorial?

Yeah, great, great question. I think Kimmy asked that. So one, our demand strategy is pretty comprehensive in nature. Performance marketing paid spend is a big driver for everyone in the space. There is a reason that one of our peer competitors had many Super Bowl commercials In order to drive demand to their business. Because again, network effects really work in marketplaces, as you all know. And once you have enough concentration of supply and demand, if you pour more fuel on the fire, you can actually consume and burn the fuel. So performance marketing is a core driver. Technical SEO is also a big component of it, which has really 2 pieces to that. There is a lot of content-driven SEO. So think about link equity and how like the relevance of our kind of search experience, we support that through like best-in-class research. Like why is Apartment List showing up on the front cover of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times talking about rental trends in the US? That's not going to acquire the next new user. But it is definitely going to improve our relevance such that when they go through a generic user goes through search, we are the single place to look. So when we think about just kind of growth marketing for us, there's like really 4 dimensions to it. SEO performance, kind of unpaid, and then all of the social components of growth that you would think about that would build virality for a renter looking for Their next place killed him.

Super helpful. And then one last question I wanted to ask for someone that sent it to me was around partnerships. You know, so do you have any tips securing those first initial partnerships?

My general feedback is be careful, be thoughtful, and not from like risk mitigation, but from resource allocation. Most partnerships don't work, like full stop. Most M&A doesn't work. Most partnerships don't work. You gotta be really good at it. And so for us, our partnerships arm is almost like a venture arm of our business. So think of it from the framework of like we might have a 20 or 30% hit rate and get outsized outcome from those 20 to 30% to offset the misses on the other 70%. So when you think about that first partnership or that first series of partnerships, one, be grounded in reality because it's really easy to think, oh my gosh, distribution for Camilla from The Knot would change everything. Well, let's think about how The Knot can potentially, I'm thinking about the wedding venue or registry, like can actually play through this. So one, I would just be thoughtful and grounded in reality. 2, I would be very, very focused on a unique problem you are trying to solve. I will give an example. We had a meaningful partnership with a company called Realtor.com, Meta Business. The unique problem they were trying to solve was they had demand, but they didn't have the corresponding supply on their marketplace in order to drive match rate, RPU, and ultimately leases. We had a ton of supply, they had the demand. We basically offset countervailing challenges. So when you pursue these partnerships, make sure that, A, there is a unique problem to solve, and 2, what you're bringing to the table really counters the strength of the partner that you're going to market with.

It's going to be really helpful tips and also examples as well. So, well, we're almost out of time here, so I definitely want to be conscious of that. But thanks for taking the time to join us here today, Matthew. This is such a great chat. I know we bounced around a little bit, but we covered lots of ground. So I know this is going to be super helpful for founders here and also to the recording. And actually, I had one last question for you, and that's my kind of closing question that I like to ask, which is that if you could go right back to before you joined Apartment List, You know, what would you tell yourself about marketplaces specifically?

Gosh, 3 things. One, this is harder than you think it's gonna be. 2, once you start to achieve kind of critical market density or network effects, you have to be prepared to like grow in an explosive fashion. Like there is a point of critical demand and then it is go time. And 3, I think akin to what I talked about earlier, it's all about the talent you surround yourself with, and not everybody will be there for each leg of the journey. And that's okay. That's part of the growth.

That's great, great parting advice for us all here. So, and things, things to look forward to, right, in the future. So once again, I appreciate it. And then last but not least, time for a quick plug. Where can we keep up with you at?

Yeah, absolutely. Feel free to follow me on LinkedIn, Matthew Woods. You can also, people have questions, don't hesitate to reach out. You can email me. My work email is mwoods@apartmentlist.com. I'm a zero inbox type of guy, so definitely will respond if I can be at all helpful to this community. I'd be happy to do so. Mike, thanks for continuing to sponsor the build out of marketplaces and building a community we can all come together in.

Well, we really appreciate it. Wouldn't be possible without, you know, awesome CEOs like you paying it forward to help. So we appreciate joining us here today once again. And thanks everyone for the great questions.