Startup du jour: MyNewPlace

STARTUP: MyNewPlace, based in San Francisco

ELEVATOR PITCH: MyNewPlace wants to be the Zillow or Trulia of the rentals market – bringing searching, mapping, and additional information to consumers via snazzy web tools.

WHAT THEY DO: U.S. apartment rental listings, very similar to Rent.com (owned by eBay). Makes money by charging property owners for rentals found through the site.

PEOPLE: CEO John Helm, founder and CEO of AllApartments/SpringStreet (sold to Homestore/Move).

FUNDING: $20 million in two rounds, including a $12 million round to be announced Monday, from VC firms Sutter Hill Ventures, Split Rock Partners, Trinity Ventures, plus real estate industry companies United Dominion Realty Trust, Essex, The Lane Company, ConAm, and Marcus & Millichap.


KEY CUSTOMERS: Large property management companies, other property owners. The 50 largest owners and management companies only control less than two million of 37 million rental properties in the U.S., so it’s a pretty fragmented market.

COMPETITORS: Rent.com, which also has a pay-per-performance business model, and ad-supported sites like Apartments.com, ForRent.com, and Move.com’s rental section.

THE DEAL: MyNewSpace is not for cities like San Francisco or New York, where Craigslist is king and rent control limits apartment turnover. Helm says his target user is a recent college grad moving to Atlanta to take a job at Coke who wants to post photos of her new apartment on her MySpace.

MyNewPlace was started at the behest of its real estate industry investors, who, as Helm puts it, wanted to see another company in the space. The advantage of the site is supposed to be its map-based display (a Google Maps mashup), flexible search features, and lack of advertising. However, in our testing searching and sorting weren’t spectacular, and many of the listings were pretty bare bones.

The company is aiming for the pool of 37 million U.S. apartments, of which it has six million listed on the site. “It’s kind of a go-big-or-go-home business. You have to get to critical mass quickly. And to that you’ve got to spend a lot of money,” says Helm. At the same time, he claims the latest funding was not needed, and was offered preemptively by new investors Sutter Hill and Split Rock.

Basically, MyNewPlace wants to be the Zillow or Trulia of the rentals market. In the contentious home sales space, brokerages aren’t quite sure how much they like web startups. MyNewPlace, on the other hand, is a total insider deal. That means the company’s not going to rock any boats – but its claim of superiority based simply on baking in new web tools is something we’ll have to keep an eye on.

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