How Apartment List is improving buyer-seller marketplace communications with Courier

With well over four million listings on its marketplace, Apartment List has been a leader in the coordination of buyers and sellers within the rental industry for over a decade. Their mission is to improve the renting experience for everyone by making the process personalized, flexible, and transparent.

Because of how important communication between buyers, sellers, and the app is for a marketplace solution, notifications are a central piece of Apartment List’s software. To handle this important part of every user’s experience, the engineering team at Apartment List built two separate apps. Both, however, were a pain to use and maintain, leading to the company eventually turning to Courier.

We spoke with Apartment List’s Senior Director of Engineering, Peter McInerney, to learn more about the two home-grown solutions, what went into the decision to buy rather than build, and how the team has fared using Courier thus far.

Notifications Drive Apartment List’s Marketplace

A marketplace like Apartment List needs to be able to maintain clear and efficient communication with both buyer and sellers (in this context, leasing agents and renters) to continue to successfully attract more listings as well as demand for them. If a leasing agent can add new listings quickly, make changes to existing ones easily, and monitor interest in real time all at at once, they are likely to increase their total number of units rented, and therefore will continue to add more listings in the future. Renters, on the other hand, need to be able to log into their accounts faster and without obstacles and receive personalized guidance based on selected preferences, which is likely to increase renter traffic on the website. With the need for high quality app-to-user communication in all these instances for leasing agents and renters, notifications are key for creating both supply and demand within the marketplace.

For both types of users, there are two major types of notifications that must be covered: marketing messages and product notifications. Marketing messages involve notes encouraging users to return to the platform and interact in the marketplace. Product notifications cover messaging within and for the product like login information and flags when a renter shows interest in a property. Because of the essential functions of product notifications, they also posed the greatest challenges that the engineering team at Apartment List first tried to approach by building solutions in-house.

Build vs. Buy

Apartment List didn’t know of any vendors at first that could handle product notifications for them, and so they tried to build a notification system in-house with a homegrown Sinatra application called Neeson. This was supplemented with Hadron, which would take input content and specifically render a template for a push notification or email. The Hadron templates were in ERB, which tends to be a major negative for Ruby developers who would prefer to stick to simple HTML, CSS, and Javascript.

Ultimately, inconveniences aside, both of these applications became a pain to use and maintain. Potentially even more importantly, they became such a time suck that the engineers at Apartment List struggled to find time for other engineering projects. “We wanted to build a house, but we didn’t necessarily want to worry about the plumbing,” said Peter as he reflected on the project.

Apartment List needed communications like emails to function as a part of their core product, but found that investing the time and resources on what ended up being a sub-par solution forced them to get tangled in the plumbing issues they wanted to avoid. Peter and his team decided that the best solution was to call the plumber by simply buying the best system from experts in the product communications space so that they could focus on building the house instead. So instead of rebuilding Neeson and Hadron from scratch, the team ultimately decided to buy rather than build when they came across Courier.