Yahoo Finance Behind the brand: Bob Makler, the mobile property aggregator with the friendly name
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When Aleksandra Danilova moved to London in 2019 for her husband’s job, searching for a flat became akin to a full-time role.
She spent her evenings on sites such as Rightmove and Zoopla and received little response from her growing enquiries. In all, it took Danilova two months to find a suitable home (requirements being light and with big windows) which could also house her two cats.
With start-up nous alongside two co-founders, property search engine Bob Makler was soon born and the premise of ‘disrupting old school property portals’.
“Renters are spending so much time searching for a home and contacting the agent. It’s an exhausting process,” Danilova said at the recent Web Summit, where she was pitching at the tech conference’s start-up competition in Lisbon.
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“Renters are also suffering because something is happening right now with high demand, long supply and long queues of candidates per one home.”
“At the same time, landlords should be in paradise but they suffer as well. They get hundreds of enquiries and often don’t choose a reliable tenant. With no scoring system in place, we wanted to solve this problem somehow.”
With the co-founders based in Talinn, Estonia, Bob Makler focused on London as a launch pad and first asked themselves how renters think when searching to let or buy.
“They don’t want to live in a box. For some it's a cosy home with good interior design, for others it’s a good location,” says Danilova.
“What if we asked renters ‘what do you really need?’ Not the number of bedrooms but whether the priority has, say, wooden or carpet floors, or what safety is like in the neighbourhoods.
“If we knew these preferences and understood property and location needs, we could match them.”
The start-up used AI to analyse all aspects of properties, from features, descriptions, crime rates, diversity, and prosperity to local schools in different areas. The innovative tech has allowed them to publicly collect data from all the major portals and Bob Makler now claims to have the biggest real-time database of listings in London.
“We want to provide more transparency for renters to react faster and make data-driven decisions, as well as identifying duplicates across the portals,” says the 33-year-old.
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The three co-founders have all worked in start-ups, including Revolut, Bolt and Vivid Money. Founded in February, Bob Makler was part of the Techstars Accelerators programme in March before launching the following month.
The mobile property aggregator’s rapid rise was underpinned by a viral Instagram post in October which highlighted the difference between prisons across the globe and expensive, cramped rooms to let in London.
It followed figures released by Rightmove that average monthly rents in the capital had risen to a record £2,627, up 12% on a year earlier.
Viewed more than 11 million times across social media, Danilova smiles when she points out that a newspaper article which ran a story on the company's viral post believed that the narrator was actually called Bob Makler. It was a marketing win.
“We thought of ways of personalising the experience, assistance and approach,” she says of the company name. “That feeling that you have with a buddy who can deal with all the tough questions.”
Makler also means broker or real estate agent in German, Swedish and Estonian. “And everyone knows Bob, it’s short and sounds good,” smiles Danilova.
“The post generated us a lot of users and I was afraid we wouldn’t get target users and it would ruin our metrics. But we were lucky and converted those who were interested in finding an apartment.
“We have this mindset that we can now deliver really fast, so we aren’t planning for three years as we can change a lot in one month. We know how to build in scale from the beginning.”
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The start-up says it intends to expand into new cities, with renters and landlords asking if it will launch in locations such as Manchester and Birmingham.
Danilova says: “We are also experiencing the same in Germany and Spain. We don’t just want to be local, but to be global and the go-to solution for all renters or buyers.”
So, given the search criteria Danilova first experienced, did her cats prove to be the catalyst for launching her UK-focused company? “Maybe they helped, it’s true,” laughs Danilova.
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