Competing for #1 site in rental housing with eBay's rent.com, Apartments.com aggregates listings from major apartment owners as well as the classifieds from 150 newspapers. As with other newspaper joint-venture properties (cars.com, shoplocal, career builder), Apartments.com then powers those newspaper sites, and gets the benefit of their local traffic.
Dean founded the company as an apartment locator service (Visual Properties) in 1992, and launched the Apartments Plus Web site in 1997. It was acquired by Classified Ventures only 11 months after the site launched. Before this Dean spent 10 years with Andersen Consulting. He and his wife now run the Make Baby Laugh company in Evanston.
Dimensions: ~100 people x 14 years x $ NDA
Funding: Tribune, McClatchy, Gannett, Washington Post and Belo
Customers: Apartment-hunters and apartment owners
Location: Chicago [Downtown] + www.apartments.com
