CASE STUDY

The Challenge

Apartment List has been around for over 15 years, having helped close to 2 million renters find home. As CEO Matthew Woods puts it: “I look at our business almost akin to an F1 car. It has the ability to go incredibly quickly, but it is a highly engineered machine.”

As Woods describes it, he's constantly challenged with how to match the speed of Apartment List while protecting the core business they've built. Rent growth has been outpacing income growth for the past decade, and Apartment List saw an opportunity to serve the price-conscious renter. But experimenting with AI-driven user flows on their flagship site was too risky. They needed another brand and another website to move fast without endangering the core business.

That became Sunny.com.

The mandate was clear: build a self-sustaining, scalable platform in 90 days. The core Apartment List team's commitments were full, and the company needed a partner that could move with them. “Qualitara was a bold decision for us because we were pushing all of our chips in,” Woods says. “There was not a secondary option. If they were not successful, Sunny would not be successful.”

The Solution

Ian Medlock, Head of Sunny, had never worked with a nearshore partner before. “You kind of hear horror stories and you're unsure of how invested they are,” he says. What changed his mind was a breakfast with Mario Siman, Qualitara's co-founder. “He spoke himself as if he were building the product. That was the inflection point for me. I knew that the team was going to be invested in the success of Sunny.”

Qualitara deployed a 7-person squad — an engineering manager, a senior product manager, four senior full-stack developers, and a senior UX/UI designer — operating as a fully managed team accountable to Apartment List's own KPIs. As Woods puts it: “When I've met with Qualitara leadership, they know what we care about. They understand the key metrics that will make this project successful and they understand what we're playing for.”

The team launched an aggressive experimentation program: field tests, user interviews, rapid prototypes, and A/B tests to validate adoption drivers. Within weeks, the evidence proved a purely conversational AI model wouldn't convert. Rather than force the hypothesis, the team pivoted fast — building a hybrid experience where AI enhances the proven rental journey instead of replacing it.

The entire user experience was redesigned from the ground up, blending the mechanics of a high-performing conversion funnel with new AI-driven features. The platform was rebuilt on modern architecture with GPT-4o at its core, using React and NestJS on the frontend and backend, running on GCP.

The AI layer powers the renter experience at every step. GPT-4o generates property summaries that break down each listing into pros, cons, and good-to-know insights, giving renters a faster way to evaluate options without reading through pages of details. Behind the scenes, the platform uses AI to match renter intent with the right properties, and the team built a hybrid flow where conversational AI and traditional search work together rather than competing.

To support the experimentation pace, the team introduced behavioral analytics and feature flagging tools, enabling the squad to run structured A/B experiments and safely roll out features without risking the live product.

Beyond the core platform rebuild, the team shipped a steady stream of product innovations: AI-powered property summaries, a Lease Guarantee feature that lets renters cancel within 90 days risk-free, Price Lock, and an interactive Map View, all managed through a scalable approach to handling user-driven and app-driven interactions across the product.

The development cadence reflected the urgency: weekly sprints, daily deploys, and a team that embraced the chaos of building from zero to one. “We would deploy a new feature every day, and every day you ship, you learn something new,” Medlock says. “The team embraced the chaos of building a product from zero to one. It was intense, but we got through it.” In just three months, Qualitara rebuilt and relaunched the platform. The result was a scalable, distinct brand that moved at startup speed while preserving the conversion power of a market leader.

The Results

Within 90 days, Sunny went from an early-stage AI experiment to a monetizable platform generating real revenue.

Business impact:

• Zero to revenue in one quarter
• Positive month-over-month trends across registration, interest, and contact rates
• January 2026 was the platform's best month, with growth expected to continue into the new calendar year

Engineering and execution excellence:

• Achieved a perfect DORA score across all four key metrics — on-demand deploys, minimal change failure rate, fast mean time to recovery, and short lead time to deploy changes
• Faster delivery times with no reduction in quality
• Created a stable foundation for ongoing AI experimentation without risking the core business

“Net new user growth, renter retention, renter reactivation and conversion rate that's scaling,” says Woods, describing where Sunny stands heading into 2026. “January was our best month and we expect to continue to build on that.”

The engagement didn't stop at the initial 90-day window. As Medlock describes it: “That was last year. And since then we've hit a couple other three-month timelines. Now we're actually generating real revenue, and that really gives us the fuel to keep going.”

“I value the relationships I've built with the Qualitara team a great deal,” Medlock says. “I'm proud that we've been able to take the risk and see that through, because that risk is going to be needed to take us to the next level.”

As a result of this partnership, Qualitara is funding a full software engineering scholarship in Central America for a student from an underserved, low-income community. The scholarship connects the success of Sunny.com to the next generation of Central American engineers, showing that world-class engineering outcomes are possible through hard work, access, and private-sector support.

Ready to Build?

Most nearshore partners give you hands. We give you outcomes. If you're looking for an engineering partner that thinks like a product team, owns your KPIs, and treats your business goals as their own — let's talk.