However you slice it, finding an apartment to rent in New York can be tough. Supply is low and demand is high.
When openigloo debuted in 2020, it promised to make that process easier for tenants. The company made a name for itself with a Yelp-like platform. Renters could leave anonymous reviews of landlords and buildings, detailing the good, the bad and the ugly of city living.
But recently, openigloo is trying a rebrand, beyond serving only tenants. The company is now courting landlords, hoping that brokerage services and data tools will get them to join in on the conversation.
It’s a tricky game. Landlords and tenants don’t always see eye-to-eye. But Allia Mohamed, the company’s cofounder and CEO, said she thinks more transparency can work for everyone.
“Our promise to renters is we want to help them find great housing,” she said. “And if we’re going to make good on that promise to our user base, we need to build these relationships with owners.”
Mohamed said the move was prompted by landlords themselves. Confronted by less-than-glowing reviews, property owners and managers would contact the openigloo, looking for a way to respond.
“We kind of ignored landlords for the longest time,” she said. “We were really just focused on building our community of renters.”
But ultimately, they started paying attention.
The most common way the company works with landlords now is with actual leasing — sort of like a brokerage. Openigloo inks agreements to exclusively list a portfolio, connecting owners to the site’s user base.
From there, the company is parsing rental applications, verifying income and running credit. If a property owner takes on an openigloo tenant, the company guarantees the rent, Mohamed said. Pricing is “dynamic,” but a typical fee starts at about half of one month’s rent. The company’s foray into landlord territory started about three years ago, but is still somewhat small in scale. Mohamed said the landlord products are in “beta mode,” but that openigloo has added one dozen new users since June and is working with more than 5,000 units.
Tenant reviews are also a part of the equation. Landlords don’t always know what’s happening on the ground in their buildings. But owners who have worked with openigloo have made management changes and improvements to their buildings based on renter reviews, Mohamed said.
“We’re their source of truth,” she said.
Playing both sides of the landlord-tenant relationship risks losing users’ trust. But Mohamed’s pitch is that everyone gets something out of the arrangement.
Renters, she said, want more than just a way to complain. They want help actually finding a good apartment. They want their buildings to be maintained.
For landlords, keeping tenants happy is a key to retaining them. That means more rent increases and fewer vacant days.
That was the case for Silverstein Properties, which has been using the company’s landlord platform, IglooIQ. Silverstein, best known as the developer behind the World Trade Center rebuilding, also operates highly-amenitized residential buildings in Manhattan (think tennis courts and cleaning services). Any turnover is expensive for the company, between renovations, broker fees and months without rent.
But even in luxury towers, it was hard to know how exactly tenants were feeling.
“They don’t answer our polls. They don’t answer our emails,” said Gil Eyal, head of marketing and innovation at Silverstein’s management arm. “Who wants to chat with their landlord?”
That made openigloo’s unfiltered reviews an asset. The Silverstein team learned what people were happy about and where they were dissatisfied. Seeing what tenants were saying drove changes, Eyal said, including in how staff were trained.
Now Silverstein partners with openigloo to lease out some apartments and drive traffic to their properties. Despite early skepticism, the company has filled the apartments quickly. Silverstein also publicly advertises its openigloo ratings.
Retention is now 85 percent at one of the properties using openigloo, Eyal said, up from less than 70 percent pre-COVID.
Eyal said platforms like openigloo that protect renters are a welcome entry into the landscape.
“We live in an age where, for good or for bad, your behavior becomes public,” he said. “Accountability, whether it comes from the law or it comes from just how you’re perceived, we think is a good thing for the industry.”
Of course, there is at least one group, Eyal said, the site won’t be good for:
“If you’re a bad actor,” he said, “you’re not going to like this platform.”
Quinn Waller contributed reporting to this article.
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