Case Study: Apartment List achieves elegant, real-time, location-based multi-device app experiences with Heroku

Apartment List Delivers Elegant, Multi-Device App Experiences on Heroku

Apartment List, a San Francisco–based apartment search service founded in 2011, consolidates thousands of rental listings into a single app used by about 3 million visitors per month and available on iPhone and Android. The team’s key challenge was delivering accurate, location-based, real-time search results—down to neighborhoods and individual street addresses—so renters could refine searches and see up-to-the-minute inventory across cities.

To solve this, Apartment List built its stack on Heroku, running 12 apps and three focused teams (mobile, web, and in-house rental specialists) on the platform to spin up, scale and iterate quickly. The result is an elegant, multi-device experience with a high‑fidelity, Pinterest-like UI, unit-level real-time availability, and tools to capture notes and media—delivering a faster, more robust apartment-hunting experience.

Apartment List

Matt Nemenman

VP of Engineering, Apartment List