[Mitch Fanning](http://rentsync.com/resources/blog/author/mitch-fanning) August 1, 2020 at 12:00 AM 8 min read # E4: Why the Rental Industry Needs Tech More than Ever, with Anthemos Georgiades, Co-Founder & CEO of Zumper Why the Rental Industry Needs Tech More than Ever with Anthemos Georgiades, Co-Founder & CEO of Zumper This content requires a premium subscription. Sync or Swim: The Multifamily Growth Show Why the Rental Industry Needs Tech More than Ever with Anthemos Georgiades, Co-Founder & CEO of Zumper 30 00:00:00/ 00:28:08 30 "I think the next generation of marketplaces are going to be full stack where you don't just do marketing, you actually help the renter and landlord through the entire transaction on one platform." – Anthemos Georgiades (21:33) The real-world experience of queuing up for access to university housing inspired [Anthemos Georgiades](https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthemos-georgiades-67933722/), Co-Founder and CEO at [Zumper](https://www.zumper.com/) to ask: "Why can't I book a 12-month lease online? Why do I have to go in person?" Fast forward a few years to the birth of Zumper, which aims to make renting an apartment as easy as booking a hotel. Mitch sits down with Anthemos to discuss its acquisition of PadMapper, the similarities and differences between the US and Canadian rental market, as well as the impact of COVID-19 on rent rates, and Zumper's cutting-edge solution "Instarent". **What we talked about:** - Zumper's business model and its future - The impact of COVID-19 on the rental market - The importance of new technologies in the rental industry ### **Highlights from this episode:** ### **How Zumper is Becoming a Dominant Force in North America** (1:49) Between Canada and the US we have 15 million visitors a month, so it's a big piece of the future. (3:32) I want to retain that urgency in our company, where we know we have to work fast, smart, harder than the big public competitors in the space like Zillow because we're smaller than them and we have to be more nimble to catch them. (4:32) I think we saw an amazing opportunity, we saw very similar consumer behaviour to the US so we knew that our platform would work in Canada and that the same filters were popular, the same method of searching, and I think the US has fierce competition for decades now between Costar, and Zillow, and RentPath, and no one was looking at Canada, but the Canadian market is enormous, and you have 5 or 6 major cities that are bigger than most American cities we operate in, and no one taking advantage of it. And we're familiar that you have Kijiji there, it's been there for a long time, and when we acquired Padmapper the main rationale was at the time they were the same size as Zumper in the US so we wanted to double. Since then Zumper's grown much faster but there's a side benefit of acquiring Padmapper was understanding the Canadian market, and so Padmapper spent years understanding how to build for Canada and crucially had built up great inventory. ### **3 Factors Influencing the Current Rental Market** (10:08) There are 3 factors pushing prices down, 2 are demand, 1 is supply. On the demand side, it's unemployment and a recession, and then it's work from home and shelter-in-place, where people don't need to live in cities anymore, so there's reduced demand. (12:13) COVID in America might be a real thing even beyond the vaccine till next summer, so I think we're in this till the medium term at least. I think the plateau of prices will happen before then, I don't think prices will continue to fall as long as COVID because I think you'll hit an equilibrium where people will still move in. ### **The Influence of Technology on the Rental Industry** (21:13) I think COVID will make people much more comfortable doing online tours before you go visit, committing to deposits through the app like you're used to using Venmo. (23:01) Zumper's typical user in Canada and the US is a 28-year-old woman, who's professional, she's moving every year. I think things that allow her to live her life with one touch point rather than multiple touch-points are helpful, so whether you can keep her in property management software or can work with a platform like Rentsync or Zumper, to help her move in.