Feature · checked 29 September 2026
The apartment search by text message that became a lead service for agents.
A New York service that let renters text for listings, pivoted to qualifying leads for real estate agents, raised $3.1 million with Y Combinator in 2017 and closed in March 2019.
When the Wayback Machine saved Riley's Stompstart page on 29 February 2016, the New York startup called itself "a personal assistant for real estate via text messaging." Renters texted a number to say what they wanted and got back listings picked from "a combination of user input and big data." The page's main argument was that nobody needed an app. Riley said it was "the only mobile-first real estate service that does not require an app download," because text messaging worked on every phone, whatever its operating system. It also promised something to the other side of the market: better conversion rates and lower vacancies for realtors and property owners.
By then Riley was already changing direction. Two days after the capture, Multifamily Executive reported that founder Daniel Ahmadizadeh had launched Riley in June 2015 as a consumer text service, meant to send traffic to his listings website, Rentity. After Riley joined Columbia University's Almaworks accelerator that autumn, the team decided its real customers were brokers, leasing agents and property managers. The new Riley connected to lead sources such as Zillow, texted each prospect within two minutes and asked pre-qualifying questions, such as square footage and the number of bedrooms or bathrooms, before an agent took over. It cost $25 a month for a single agent.
In May 2017 TechCrunch reported that Riley had raised a $3.1 million seed round from investors including Y Combinator, FundersClub, Social Capital, Fuel Capital and Kleiner Perkins. Ahmadizadeh said he and his co-founder, Helson Taveras, had applied to Y Combinator several times before Riley joined its winter class. The texting was now done by live concierges, "mostly college students for now," according to Ahmadizadeh, working from scripts, and Ahmadizadeh said Riley was already managing more than 100,000 conversations a month. Each morning agents would see which of their leads were worth calling first.
On 11 March 2019 Ahmadizadeh announced on LinkedIn that Riley was shutting down. "We started the company four years ago to offer an alternative solution to leasing real estate in NYC," he wrote. He gave the company's figures: "At just over 400 users, we were north of $80k in MRR," meaning monthly recurring revenue. But customers kept leaving. "Our team worked for thirteen months to solve our churn problem," he wrote, and listed why it could not. Customers "did not find value in standardized conversations and insisted on custom and personalized conversations." Riley had no moat, since "the barrier to entry to start a human-chat center was low." Its market turned over quickly: "83% of real estate agents stop being agents within 5 years." He also cited uneven quality in conversations and onboarding, and competitors that offered more human work, such as calling leads. To investors he wrote: "We estimate to be able to return 20% of each of your initial investments and hopefully a little more."
Ten days later Online Marketplaces covered the closure, quoting Ahmadizadeh's summary: "we were unable to land on making a scalable, high-quality solution that users love in real estate."
The textriley.com address on the listing now forwards to an unrelated AI companion service, and the later getrileynow.com domain returns an access error.