Neil Lunagaria of Oodle on advertising rentals and other classifieds

BrokerIPTV: We are on the floor here at Real Estate Connect in San Francisco 2008 and I am with Neil Lunagaria. Neil is the... are you the Founder and CEO of Oodle?

Neil Lunagaria: I am not. I am Director of Sales for Oodle. I have been with the company for about a year-and-a-half. I predominantly work in our real estate and rentals categories.

BrokerIPTV: So, tell me about Oodle.

Neil Lunagaria: We are actually a search engine for classifieds, actually second largest classified site next to craigslist. Distant second, but second on the list. We have much like craigslist, we have about nine categories across the board, which include real estate, rentals, jobs, tickets, personals, so, people can come in, look for a girlfriend in personals, look for a house on real estate, look for an apartment or look for a job. Great synergy amongst all classified categories.

BrokerIPTV: So, what do you think the biggest difference is then say... why do you think craigslist has such a big user base and what is your user base compared to craigslist?

Neil Lunagaria: Great question. Our user base is basically more driven to consumer to business whereas craigslist is more consumer to consumer. Although the community is more engaged on craigslist because they have been around for so long and they've done a great job you know expanding their listings around the country. We are a few years younger than craigslist obviously, so... and again, our model is a little bit different. We are not, not for profit; we are profit... you know we are working for profitability. The difference really being is we don't want to own any of those listings. We want to obviously make sure that consumers will come to our site, find what they are looking for, and you know basically you have them go off of our site to the corresponding URL, mostly our client, mostly our partners.

BrokerIPTV: Interesting. How is your rental market? You have a lot of rentals?

Neil Lunagaria: We do. I don't know the exact number. I want to say probably about 2.2 million rental listings, big ones that include national aggregators[Phonetic] like apartments.com, rent.com, forrent, and then we are also obviously speaking with direct sources like archstonesmith and companies like that as well.

BrokerIPTV: Well, I'll tell you what, next time I have a maybe a lawn mower or a rental I've got to do, I'll try Oodle versus say craigslist.

Neil Lunagaria: Give us a shot. That's all we ask.

BrokerIPTV: All right. Great. Well, thank you very much Neil.

Neil Lunagaria: [Inaudible]

Posted on October 12, 2008 10:13:11 by Blog Author