residential real estate
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Hello Alfred launches new platform to reach more buildings and improve accessibility
Hello Alfred — the startup that assigns in-home assistants to take care of your recurring chores and tasks — has announced the launch of a new service tier that will provide more properties and residents with access to the company’s underlying technology.
The company, which won the Startup Battlefield competition at our 2014 Disrupt event in San Francisco, looks to unlock valuable time for users by handling the long list of small routine items that add up over the course of a week and still require human oversight.
Hello Alfred partners with building owners to provide residents with dedicated home managers that assist with various errands and on-request services, such as apartment cleaning, grocery delivery, laundry services, prescription refills and more. Users have a direct line of communication with the company’s hospitality team through Hello Alfred’s mobile app, where they can manage tasks and set recurring appointments.
The new platform, “Powered by Alfred,” acts as a fairly similar but more accessible alternative to the company’s current offering. Residents in buildings equipped with “Powered by Alfred” are given access to all of the company’s solutions with the exception of the weekly visits from dedicated home managers currently included in the existing service. By excluding the dedicated in-home service, Hello Alfred is able to offer its new service tier at a lower price point and integrate with more buildings faster.
Property owners using “Powered by Alfred” can customize packages to include the services that best fit the needs of their residents and can upgrade or change service levels at any time. Both residents and building owners using the new platform are also given more control and direct access to Hello Alfred’s proprietary technology, allowing users to control functions that normally fall under the purview of the company’s dedicated home managers.
Additionally, with the launch of the new offering, Hello Alfred will be consolidating its various solutions under one central app, where residents and building managers can handle all inquiries, appointments and payments.
Hello Alfred’s new service tier, “Powered by Alfred,” provides a single, shared access point for resident and property owners to manage inquiries and drive property performance / Hello Alfred Press Kit
The launch of “Powered by Alfred” seems to be a natural evolution for the company, which seeks to make its offering more accessible to all residents of all backgrounds.
Hello Alfred previously employed a consumer-facing business model, in which customers would pay a monthly subscription fee for the array of in-home services and access to the company’s team of hospitality specialists, referred to as Alfreds.
However, around the time of the startup’s Series B round, Hello Alfred adopted the model of partnering directly with property owners to offer its services complimentary to residents. The partnership structure was not only a more conducive model for scaling but also enabled the company to offer the same services to any resident in an Alfred-equipped building, regardless of socioeconomic status.
Hello Alfred quickly built up a sizeable backlog of property owners hoping to integrate the platform into their units, according to the company. However, the task of maintaining dedicated staffing for every unit in every location made it difficult for the Alfred team to satisfy its swelling demand, having to instead focus resources primarily on luxury properties.
With “Powered by Alfred” removing in-home management services, the company has been able to improve accessibility and better satisfy the market’s appetite for its services, now rolling out the offering to non-luxury buildings and properties that previously sat in its pipeline.
Behind the launch of the new platform — which the company has piloted over the course of several months — Hello Alfred has increased its market share by more than 50 percent, with its services now available in more than 150,000 residential properties.
“We want Alfred to be a utility. We want to make “help” a universal utility and make it something anyone can access,” Hello Alfred CEO and co-founder Marcela Sapone told TechCrunch. “We wanted to find a way where we could accelerate growth and get human-focused help into urban buildings to help most urban environments.”
The launch represents the latest step in Hello Alfred’s broader expansion plans, which appear to have ramped up in recent months. Hello Alfred is now active in 16 cities — including Houston, where the company plans to launch next week — with its new offering available across all of its active markets. The startup already boasts an impressive partnership roster that includes more than 20 of the largest property owners in the U.S., and the Alfred team expects its new offering to open up further opportunities for partnerships across different property classes and different stages of a resident’s life cycle.
“As WeWork transformed commercial real estate, Hello Alfred is transforming residential real estate, and redefining what it means to live in a city today,” said Sapone. “This business expansion allows us to not only satisfy increasing demand for our service, but to connect every part of the resident experience — from the moment you sign your lease, until the moment you move to another Hello Alfred building.”
To date, the company has raised just over $63.5 million in venture capital, according to data from PitchBook, from prestigious investment brands that include New Enterprise Associates, Spark Capital, SV Angel, Moderne Ventures, Invesco and others.
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Blueground raises $20 million for flexible apartment rentals
Blueground, the startup providing turnkey flexible rental apartments, has raised $20 million in a round led by Athens-based VentureFriends, with participation from Endeavor Catalyst, Dubai’s Jabbar Internet Group and serial entrepreneur Kevin Ryan. Ryan — who helped found MongoDB, Gilt Groupe, Zola and others — will also join Blueground’s board of directors.
It’s no secret that remote work and frequent business travel are becoming more and more commonplace. As a result, a growing number of people are shying away from lengthy rental or lease commitments and are instead turning to companies like Blueground for more flexible short-term solutions.
Blueground is trying to be the go-to option for individuals moving or traveling to a city for as little as a month, or any duration longer. Similar to flexible office space providers, Blueground partners with major property owners to sign long-term leases for units it then furnishes and rents out with more flexible terms.
Users can rent listings for anywhere between one month to five years, and rates are set on a monthly basis, which can often lead to more favorable prices over medium-to-long-term stays relative to the short-term pricing structures commonly used by hospitality companies.
Filling hospitality gaps and easing rental friction
CEO Alex Chatzieleftheriou is intimately familiar with the value flexible leasing can unlock. Before founding Blueground, Chatzieleftheriou worked as a consultant for McKinsey, where he was frequently sent off to projects in far-off cities for months at a time — living in 15 cities over just seven years.
However, no matter how much time Alex logged in hotels, he constantly felt the frustration and mental strain of not having a stable personal living arrangement.
“I spent so much time in hotels but they never really resembled a home. They didn’t have enough space or enough privacy,” Chatzieleftheriou told TechCrunch. “But renting an apartment can be a huge pain in these cities. They can be hard to find, they usually have a minimum rental term of a year or more, and you usually have to deal with filling out paperwork and buying furniture.”
Knowing there were thousands of people at his company alone dealing with the same frustrations, Alex launched what would become Blueground, beginning with a handful of apartments in his home city of Athens, Greece.
Chatzieleftheriou and his team structured the platform to make the rental process as seamless as possible for the needs of flexible renters like himself. Through a quick plug-and-play checkout flow — more similar to the booking process for a hotel or Airbnb — renters can lock down an apartment without having to deal with the painful, costly and time-consuming traditional rental process. Tenants are also able to switch to any other Blueground listing during their rental period if their preferences change or if they want to explore different locations during their stay.
Every Blueground listing also comes completely furnished by the company’s design team, so renters don’t have to deal with buying, transporting — and eventually selling — furniture. And each apartment comes outfitted with digital and connected infrastructure so that tenants can monitor their apartment and arrange maintenance, housekeeping and other services directly through Blueground’s mobile app.
The value proposition is also fairly straightforward for the landlords Blueground partners with, as they avoid costs related to marketing and coordinating with fragmented brokers to fill open units, while also benefiting from steady rental payments, tenant vetting and free property management.
The offering certainly seems to be compelling for renters — while Chatzieleftheriou initially focused on serving business travelers and those moving for work, he quickly realized the market for flexible leasing was in fact much bigger. Blueground’s sales have tripled over the past three years and after its expansion in the U.S. last year, Blueground now hosts 1,700 listings in 10 cities across three continents.
“The trend of flexible and seamless real estate is bigger and is happening everywhere,” Chatzieleftheriou said. “A lot of people throughout the real estate sector really want this seamless, turnkey, furnished solution.”
To date, Blueground has raised a total of $28 million and plans to use funds from the latest round for additional hiring and to help the company reach its goal of growing its portfolio to 50,000 units over the next five years.
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