Zumper

How apartment lead-gen arbitrage actually works

Sam explains the lead-gen middleman model behind sites like Zumper: apartment buildings pay portals ~$100 per call/lease, so a startup offers to sell them qualified email leads at ~$10 each, building a cheaper acquisition funnel and pocketing the spread.

“Will you give us $10 per email we give you of people who are qualified leads? So what Zumper did, I imagine they did this when they launched, and I'll explain why I say when they launched is what they did was they go to these places and they go, all right, give us a cut of the revenue per email. And so the math works out that if we send you 5 emails, Basically people who said, here's my email address, here's my phone number, I'm interested in a 2-bedroom at this particular building. Apartments will be like, all right, we'll give you $10 for that because we're pretty confident that for every 5 of these we collect, one of them will become a lead.”

Steal thisFind a category where buyers already pay big per closed lead, then sell them cheaper qualified leads and keep the spread.