An ambitious young real estate search startup
Just two days shy of the one year mark of opening their beta to the public, San Francisco-based rental search company, Lovely is announcing their search is now nationally available, a goal they expressed to AGBeat one year ago. The company enjoys major financial backing and a strong talent pool and strong leader, and is well known for their beautiful, modern design.
Announcing in February a massive rollout, it appears the company has made the leap to all search areas with their innovative tools, including search by photo which they built and launched in a single weekend.
Lovely was founded by Blake Pierson and Doug Wormhoudt, who say their mission has long been to corner the most competitive rental markets in the country and thusly coming to the relief of frustrated renters nationwide. Pierson said in a statement, “Similar to Kayak and Orbitz in the online travel space, it is our goal to compete against the likes of Trulia, Zillow and others in the online rental space by offering the best consumer search experience on the web. We are excited to be partnering with over a dozen data providers nationwide, allowing us to bring the majority of listings in any given city across the U.S. to our search platform. So today we are excited to announce we have launched nationwide, bringing our search experience to thousands of cities across the U.S.”
The long road to going national
What did it take to tackle their national aspirations? Lovely Founder, Blake Pierson told AG, “A lot of hard work, specifically around product and the user experience. Up until now we’ve really been focused on user engagement with our product in our core markets of focus, which requires a lot of hard work around data quality (we do a ton on the data side!) and ensuring the overall experience for users is simple, intuitive and pain free.”
Pierson added, “We feel really good about where the product and the experience is for renters and are ready to scale that experience to renters all across the U.S.. We know there will be growing pains on a market by market basis in terms of refining data quality and the user experience – real estate is local and every market is unique and different – but it’s a challenge we’re excited to take on, especially given how well Lovely has performed with out users so far.”
