{"id":21346,"date":"2016-02-17T12:25:40","date_gmt":"2016-02-17T12:25:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/how_apartment_list_increased_conversion_and_reduced_development_time"},"modified":"2022-03-31T15:45:11","modified_gmt":"2022-03-31T22:45:11","slug":"how_apartment_list_increased_conversion_and_reduced_development_time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cloudinary.com\/blog\/how_apartment_list_increased_conversion_and_reduced_development_time","title":{"rendered":"How Apartment List increased conversion and reduced development time"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>\n
Apartment List<\/a> is one of the fastest-growing online rental marketplaces<\/strong> in the world, helping its users with everything from searching for a new apartment to handling applications and payments. The company\u2019s Webby-award winning site draws more than 2.5 million monthly visits, with mobile accounting for 70 percent of traffic. In 2014, Apartment List introduced top-rated iOS app. It was named the #3 fastest growing company in the San Francisco Bay Area.<\/div>\n

The Challenge: Labor-Intensive Scaling and a Reliable Storage Platform<\/h2>\n
When Apartment List was creating its first website in 2011, their developers quickly ran up against a significant challenge: achieving the scale needed to upload millions of images<\/strong> of apartment interiors, property exteriors and other images from clients and deliver them to potential renters using the site.<\/div>\n
\u201cOur system was built using standard, off-the shelf components, and we were constantly having operational issues given our scale<\/strong>,\u201d said Matt Nemenman, Apartment List\u2019s vice president of Engineering. \u201cSometimes there would be broken images because the system wasn\u2019t processing images fast enough<\/strong>, and we were forced to buy additional hardware to scale.\u201d<\/div>\n
The initial system was labor intensive, as well. Two engineers<\/strong> were dedicated full-time to maintaining the natively built system. Even with the dedicated manpower, engineering was not able to support the design team with all the image resolutions and aspect ratios they required. \u201cOne of the main things we needed was different sizes of images to serve them to mobile devices, desktops, phones of different sizes and different operating systems<\/strong>. But every time our team would redesign the site, we\u2019d run into major problems with photo sizes,\u201d Nemenman noted. \u201cWith more than 23 million photos in use every day<\/strong>, it was time- consuming to have to reprocess all of those.\u201d<\/div>\n
Storage was another concern. Apartment List received thousands, sometimes millions, of images at a time, so it needed a reliable storage platform<\/strong> that could handle the library of images and properties listed on the sight as it grew.<\/div>\n
After about six months of attempting to get its system to work seamlessly, Apartment List decided to revisit its processes and find a better solution for image management<\/strong>. Enter Cloudinary.<\/div>\n
 <\/div>\n
 \"Apartment<\/div>\n

The Cloudinary Solution: Seamless Process from Storage to Transformation to Delivery<\/h2>\n
\u201cCloudinary gave us an end-to-end solution that provides us the storage we needed, while automating image transformation and supporting faster delivery,<\/strong>\u201d said Nemenman.<\/div>\n
Cloudinary enables Apartment List to effectively take any image format \u2013 JPEGs, PNGs and others \u2013 in a variety of resolutions, and transform them all into a format that works best for each browser or mobile client. Apartment List picks up data feeds of images from all of the apartment communities featured on its site, and uploads them into Cloudinary. After being given a unique ID, each image undergoes different transformations so it can be used in mobile and desktop versions of the site.<\/div>\n
With Cloudinary, Apartment List also is able to filter<\/strong> out low quality images (low resolution, pictures of people faces, logos, etc.) and label<\/strong> pictures to help identify the features of the apartments being shown. <\/div>\n

The Results: Time and Cost Savings, with a Bonus of Increased Conversion Rates<\/h2>\n
During the first three years of use, Apartment List has seen tangible results from its<\/div>\n
use of Cloudinary. After a smooth, short transition from its home-grown system to Cloudinary\u2019s cloud-based solution, Nemenman estimates that the automation has saved the equivalent of one full-time engineer managing day-to-day operations, and thousands of man-hours required previously to transform images.<\/strong><\/div>\n
 <\/div>\n
\u201cCloudinary has allowed us to solve our operational issues, produce various resolutions of images and cache them at endpoints closer to the end user for an optimal user experience,\u201d said Nemenman, noting that after launching its native iOS app in 2015, Apartment List received positive feedback about how fast images loaded.<\/strong><\/div>\n
Apartment List also credits Cloudinary, in part, with conversion rates that increased nearly 20 percent<\/strong> after a redesign of its listing detail page. \u201cWe moved to a responsive design, and that would not have been possible without Cloudinary,<\/strong>\u201d Nemenman concluded, adding that \u201cCloudinary offers one of those great services, which we implemented three years ago and have been using happily ever after<\/strong>.\u201d<\/div>\n
 <\/div>\n
Download case study<\/span> <\/a><\/em><\/div>\n
\"case<\/a><\/em><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Apartment List is one of the fastest-growing online rental marketplaces in the world, helping its users with everything from searching for a new apartment to handling applications and payments. The company\u2019s Webby-award winning site draws more than 2.5 million monthly visits, with mobile accounting for 70 percent of traffic. In 2014, Apartment List introduced top-rated […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":41,"featured_media":21347,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_cloudinary_featured_overwrite":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[47,281],"class_list":["post-21346","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-case-study","tag-success-story"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nApartment List speeds up development and scales rapidly<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Apartment List utilize Cloudinary to speed up their development, scale rapidly and improve their image-rich app user experience\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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