Spacelet is a leading local real estate marketplace helping New Yorkers find a place to call home.
Spacelet was founded by John Matsis after he saw an opportunity to better serve renters and agents. As John is actually a broker himself, he has first-hand exposure to the frustrations of renters and agents.
We love working with entrepreneurs like John, he has another business but is trying to innovate and building out his side hustle without dropping everything. In New York, there are two dominant websites where renters find apartments: StreetEasy and Craisglist – yes, really Craigslist.
So what’s the problem with StreetEasy? Well StreetEasy used to be a great platform for agents because it was free and focused exclusively on the New York market (anyone that’s ever lived there knows it a different animal). Customers and agents both love it. However, StreetEasy was acquired by Zillow and as you can guess, everything changed. They started charging for listings.
So where does Craigslist go wrong? We’ll its ugly, has a lack of trust by many users, and has not innovated in years. This gave John the confidence to start Spacelet and create a platform that could differentiate itself in such a crowded market.
Spaclets differentiation
- Spacelet picks up where StreetEasy left off and allows agents to list their listings for free
- Spacelet focuses exclusively on rentals
- Renters can search, filter, view, and save over 40,000 listings in New York all on a beautiful UI
- Renters can reach out directly too agents about a particular listing from the platform
- Most importantly, renters can apply for FREE (no application or credit check fee) directly on the Spacelet platform to as many apartments as they want on Spacelet. This right here is a game changer. To make this happen we partnered with Naborly, who built tenant screening software that powers Spacelet.
How’s Reliable Bits has helped Spacelet
Reliable Bits came into the picture about six months into Spacelet’s journey and hasn’t looked back. John was looking for a reliable technology partner so he could focus on growing the business. It’s now been over a year and a half since Reliable Bits has taken over the tech and design for Spacelet and we’ve accomplished a lot. Here are some of the highlights:
- Completely redesigned the platform.
- Updated the tech stack to React and Node
- Integrated rental listing feed API that now has pulled over 40,000 listings and 6,000 agents
While Spacelet is just starting to really get the word out in New York, we are in the works to build a mobile native iOS app and by the end of the year, Spacelet plans to connect to nearly 600 MLS databases nationwide, bringing their simplified search and free tenant screening tools to over 100,000 rental listings across the US.
We love working with entrepreneurs like John who are trying to build their side hustles into full time businesses.
We are so proud of what we’ve built with Spacelet and feel honored to help New Yorkers find a place to call home.