Iris avoids stale/scammy listings by being hyperlocal to SF and controlling who can post. While we do allow individuals to create accounts and list, every lister is reviewed and personally vetted. Most inventory comes from property managers and leasing firms, with a smaller number of verified individual owners — we don’t scrape listings or anonymous posts.

Because we focus only on SF, listers are expected to keep availability and pricing actively updated, and stale listings don’t persist the way they can on nationwide platforms. AI helps on the discovery side through natural-language and image search, but trust comes from supply-side controls and local verification, not AI alone

Inventory is sourced directly, not through an API, as of now. Today it’s more manual. We onboard property managers, leasing firms, and some owners directly and we’re building bulk upload and PMS integrations to scale that. We intentionally don’t rely on scraped or syndicated feeds because that’s where stale inventory tends to creep in.

We’re focused on one city because real estate is inherently hyperlocal. Being the default marketplace for SF requires local supply controls and city-specific features that don’t generalize well at national scale. (For example, we have something as simple as a rent control toggle)

National platforms are built for everyone, which usually means generic filters and shallow context. SF renters care about things like rent control, transit lines, block-level differences and other details that get flattened at national scale.