Case Study: Apartment List achieves increased revenue and reduced costs with UserTesting

How a focus on empathy is helping more renters find homes they love

Apartment List is a technology‑driven rental marketplace that matches renters to homes based on preferences, with a mission to deliver every renter a home they love. Because the company is paid only when renters move in, it faces high stakes in launching the right features at the right time for both renters and property owners—making accurate, empathy‑driven product decisions essential to protect revenue and manage development costs.

To address this, Apartment List’s research team uses rapid, repeated user testing on UserTesting to validate assumptions, iterate on prototypes, and build empathy across the company. That approach reduced the risk of launching the wrong products, lowered engineering and design costs, and increased revenue—helping the company reach profitability in 2020 with 5.5 million listings, 30 million registered users, and a $60M Series D round.

Apartment List

Daniel Kim

UX Research Manager