Speak of the devil, we just mentioned the former massive network effects from old sites, in particular the NYC loved and hated Craigslist. Researches and professors at the Harvard Business School have studied the phenomenon at length – or at least they wrote a case study about Lawrence Zhou and Lee Lin battling the giant incumbent. Back in the early days of RentHop, leaders training to make a difference in the world debated whether we would survive.
Fast forward years later and the ecosystem has completely reversed. RentHop has the largest selection of apartments, flats, condos, co-ops, and shares in New York City, with rapid growth in many other metro areas. However, CL is not just an apartment finder anymore – according to a discussion on Hacker News, a lot of people still find it useful for selling used cars, used trucks, or so called “weird items.”
The first thing to notice is a clear preference for the lavender / purple / pink mixture in their color theme. The actual website has none of the pastel components, so perhaps their front and back ends are made by completely different teams. On the other hand,. they seem to have a stacked map-mode search – are they abandoning the prioritization by Freshness?
Not to be outdone, RentHop has two separate mobile apps, RentHop for renter consumers, and RentHop Manager for agents and managers. For most people, you do NOT want RentHop Manager. That’s the one with the black background, instead of the white and blue – no pastel for us.
