Case Study: Apartment List achieves 20% conversion lift and saves a full-time engineer on image management with Cloudinary

Apartment List Sold on Cloudinary for Image Management

Apartment List is a fast-growing online rental marketplace (over 2.5 million monthly visits, 70% mobile) that struggled to scale its home-grown image system as it ingested millions of photos. The company faced broken or slow image processing, heavy storage demands, and a labor-intensive workflow that required dedicated engineers and time-consuming reprocessing whenever the site was redesigned.

Switching to Cloudinary gave Apartment List end-to-end cloud storage, automated on-the-fly image transformations, quality filtering and labeling, and faster delivery via caching—enabling responsive design and improved mobile performance. The move eliminated the need for a full-time image engineer, saved thousands of man-hours, and helped drive a nearly 20% lift in listing conversion rates after a redesign.

Apartment List

Matt Nemenman

VP of Engineering, Apartment List