This virtual apartment tour startup is working with Brookfield and Greystar to bring the e-commerce experience to apartments

When pandemic lockdowns first hit, real estate agents and landlords scrambled to keep their markets active when prospective buyers and renters couldn’t tour properties in person. Many turned to self-administered virtual tours to guide clients around over FaceTime, or if the budget was there, to a professional videographer.

Digital scanning technology — which allows people to control tours of properties on their own time, also became popular. One of the originators of the industry, Matterport, went public in 2021 as demand surged, but another upstart in the same category captured the attention of large landlords by focusing explicitly on the challenge of leasing.

Peek was founded in 2019 by two roommates who met on Craigslist. They planned to differentiate their business by creating virtual tours that replicate the e-commerce shopping experiences that are knit into the daily lives of most consumers, but with the unusual product of apartment rentals. They also sought to incorporate a less tangible feature that was lacking in online apartment rentals but essential to e-commerce: trust, according to Austin Lo, the CEO and cofounder.

“Apartments can’t be reviewed like products online, because not enough people actually experience them” said Lo, who invested in e-commerce companies while working at investment managers J Goldman and Nomura, and who was a licensed New York real estate agent. Plus, perceptions can vary greatly, he added, such that “someone’s experience on the 13th floor facing the west may be very different from someone in a third floor unit facing east.”

Peek has grown its portfolio to 150,000 units in just three years after partnering with some of the largest landlords in the country like Brookfield and Toll Brothers, and Greystar, which said its “leasing approach” has evolved, as a result. Peek has also won $2.5 million in fresh seed funding led by GFA Venture Partners, bringing its total funding to $4 million. A look at Peek’s data dashboard for landlords. Peek

Peek’s model is built around the leasing process. Its features include automatic uploads of  its virtual tours to marketing portals like StreetEasy when apartments become vacant, and integration of its product into the onsite self-guided tours of its partners, with the goal of reducing workloads for leasing agents. The tours also generate data about the behavior of prospective tenants, that can help landlords rent vacant units faster, according to Lo.

“Through Peek, I can tell whether somebody spent 70% of their time looking at their kitchens,” Lo said. “The leasing team can follow up and say, ‘Did you know we only have one more rental with this floorplan with the upgraded countertop and Viking stove?'”

Peek says that the virtual tours, and the data that they provide, save its customers $750 per unit via reduced vacancy times, largely because a prospective tenant is three times more likely to lease an apartment after an in-person tour if they had previously seen a virtual tour of the same apartment. As the company grows, it hopes to use the data to understand consumer preferences, too. 

Virtual tours seem to to be a permanent change born of the pandemic, much like the increase in working from home. Settling on virtual tour technology is another question, however, since a lot of the solutions adopted by property managers in a panic during the pandemic are not scaleable, Lo contended.