Rentsync has been one of Canada's go-to sites for those looking to rent or list a residential property online. The marketing and advertising software firm is now expanding its offerings into the commercial real estate sector with the acquisition of Spacelist.

“We’ve had a 14-year focus on residential, but there’s a lot of overlap in customer base between both multiresidential landlords and property management companies, as well as in the commercial space, and hence our interest to add Spacelist to our portfolio,” said Max Steinman, chief executive officer of Rentsync, in an interview with RENX.

The Toronto based company, founded in 2010, will roll Spacelist under its existing portfolio of online listing brands, which were purchased in 2019, he said.

Its main product is Rentals.ca but also includes other brands.

“We own six or seven different sites: Rentfaster, RentBoard, Louer out of Quebec, and a whole bunch of others and that’s a big, big part of our business. On the renting side of things, we have custom software for landlords and property management companies to manage all their marketing and leasing efforts and residents.”

“The Spacelist acquisition more fits in our listings business, Rentals.ca, but it’s commercial and it’s our first foray out of residential,” Steinman said.

Financial details of the Spacelist acquisition have not been disclosed.

New investments into Spacelist

The commercial listings site has “a great reputation and it ranks really well online. It’s got great traffic and that was definitely what we like about it."

It has already added Spacelist’s “small but mighty” staff of four employees to the parent company’s stable of around 150 employees and is hoping to invest further into the brand.

“It’s got to where it is very organically. We want to turn it from a phenomenon, to something quite a bit more and invest in it substantially; professionalize it, but we don’t want to lose that good entrepreneurial vibe that it has,” he said.

“We’re definitely going to keep the Spacelist brand alive and well. It’s a phenomenal brand.”

That investment includes adding more employees and spending more money on the technology, according to Steinman.

“We’re going to go at that really quick. We’re already hiring-up to add staff fully on the product side, and to build out new innovation and new products that are really focused on bringing a professionalization, especially for its large-scale, enterprise-grade commercial network.”

Learning about a new real estate sector

But first Rentsync will spend time discovering more about its newest acquisition - because it is entering a new sector.

“We want to spend a lot of time sitting down with Spacelist’s existing customers, learning and doing a really deep dive before we start putting horsepower behind some of the innovation. We want to listen, because we’re less familiar with the commercial space.

“We need to build up our knowledge there a little bit, and we’re cognizant of that, but we think we’re still very much the right team to execute on this because we’ve executed on the same playbook on the resi side.”

Its goal is to bring all aspects of Spacelist’s marketplace up to the same level as those of Rentsync, Steinman said.

“We’re really hoping that we can provide the same level of sophistication and enterprise-grade marketing and advertising services - that our residential portfolio has come to really appreciate - into the commercial environment, which we see as being a little less mature and helping to catch up the online listing and leasing process in the commercial world, which has been a little more old school for the last five years, and progressed a little bit less than the tech in the residential side.”

As well, the company is hoping to tap into an underserved part of the market.

“Because brokers are a big part of the commercial game, those guys, they’ve been seeking. There’s just not a lot of providers in the Canadian space that are focused on that,” Steinman said.

Rentsync believes this acquisition will make it a one-stop shop for both renters and landlords.

“Essentially, now we cover everyone looking for real estate online, of any asset type.

"Everything from office, retail, industrial, even land and our market is also those who are seeking out offices for rent or for lease, whether it’s a new office for a small business or a manufacturing company looking for industrial space, those immediately have become new target audiences for Rentsync.”