Aiming To Grow Its Content Efforts, Rent Management Startup Cozy Acquires Landlordology

Cozy, a startup aiming to make the rental process easier for landlords and tenants, is announcing that it has made its first acquisition â€" landlord advice site Landlordology.

The tools currently offered by Cozy include collecting rent online, managing payments from multiple roommates, and screening tenants. Landlordology, meanwhile, features a number of guides and advice-focused articles for landlords and property owners, “especially those with 50 rental units or less.” (Sample post: “10 Best Practices to Prevent Tenant Lawsuits.”) Its traffic has supposedly been increasing 20 to 30 percent every month since it launched in January 2012.

Cozy co-founder and CEO Gino Zahnd told me via email that Landlordology will continue to operate as a standalone site. Apparently it’s operated by one person, founder Lucas Hall, who will continue to run it and remain in Washington, D.C., while also become community manager at Cozy (which is based in Portland, Ore. and San Francisco). Of course, Zahnd said they’ll be looking at ways to integrate the two sites, too.

“We’ve been thinking about a ways to execute on the content side of things for a long time, and would’ve built this internally had we not forged a relationship with Lucas,” he added. “Joining forces with Landlordology makes so much sense: We’re fundamentally improving the building blocks of an industry for which great design has never been applied. Renting hasn’t really changed in centuries!”

The last time I wrote about Cozy, Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield had joined its board. At the time, Butterfield said that the startup’s biggest challenge would be distribution â€" namely, getting the word out among landlords. Acquiring Landlordology seems like one way to do that.