Space to Move

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Tony Adam

The housing market might finally be in recovery, but Eventup Inc. doesn’t mind when a nice mansion sits on the market for a while.

The Santa Monica company runs a web-based service that hooks up event planners with available venues, and some of its prime spots have come thanks to an abundance of high-end houses looking for permanent tenants.

One listing for Eventup is a two-story mansion nestled against a hillside in Beverly Hills. While the owner has been searching for a long-term tenant, the space is available for a corporate event or wedding for about $3,500 a night.

Growth has been brisk for Eventup since it launched last year out of Santa Monica incubator Science Inc. The company has expanded its service to eight large cities, including last month’s move into Washington, D.C., and now has more than 5,000 venues.

Co-founder Tony Adam said the service fills a need both for people looking for a distinctive location for an event and for property owners who want to make some money on the side.

“A lot of these spaces are vacant while they’re on the market and stay vacant for multiple months at a time,” Adam said. “For some of these underutilized assets, a homeowner can easily make tens of thousands of dollars a year renting it out for events.”

Eventup’s site works as a resource for property owners as well as the event planners. Someone who wants to offer a space as a potential venue can list it on the site for free, along with minimum and maximum rental rates. The property is then added to the directory of available venues that an event planner can peruse on the site. People can request a price quote on specific venues and the final rate is negotiated by the property owner and Eventup’s internal sales staff. The company takes a 15 percent cut from each rental.

Although the majority of properties that Eventup deals with are residences, the site has a wide roster of venues, including restaurants, galleries and banquet halls. Locally, the prices range from $500 a night for a quirky arboreal manor in central Los Angeles up through $25,000 for a night at the Sowden House in Los Feliz. Eventup embraces many of the more unusual spots around town, including a Hollywood Hills estate that looks like a castle – complete with moat and drawbridge.

The company’s niche in the online rental world is fairly new. While event planning is often handled by agencies that have connections to various venues, the concept of culling all the venues in a central marketplace is an update to a commercial real estate industry that has been slow to migrate online.

“There’s considerable interest in trying to solve an age-old problem in real estate: matching up people’s demands with the available space,” said Bob Bridges, a professor of finance and business economics at USC’s Marshall School of Business. “The Internet can help make that info more widely available, but nobody has found that right formula yet.”


Online hub

Adam arrived at the idea for an online market for event space a few years ago, after hearing about the difficulty a friend’s mom was having in renting out her ranch in Santa Barbara. It made no sense, he thought, that someone who owned a desirable venue couldn’t easily be linked up with a party planner. Adam has worked in tech for a decade, including online marketing positions at San Francisco’s PayPal Inc. and Myspace Inc. in Beverly Hills.

He and co-founder Colby Palmer brought the idea of an online hub for event planners and property owners to Science in 2011; last May, the company raised $1.8 million in a seed funding round led by Chicago venture capital firm Lightbank.

Eventup currently has 35 employees, most of whom work in the Santa Monica headquarters, and a few in a Chicago sales office. Eventup officials didn’t disclose revenue, but Adam said the company has been averaging monthly revenue growth of 60 percent during the past eight months.

Eventup’s business model bears some resemblance to San Francisco’s Airbnb Inc., a website that lets homeowners turn empty houses, vacant bedrooms or empty couches into a hotel room. That service has been a big hit with travelers looking to book a room on the cheap or find a place that’s outside the hotel-motel paradigm.

But Adam said Eventup has a much larger scope than just arranging a place for someone to crash for a night or two.

“Events are so different; it’s not as standard as a quick booking for a hotel room,” he said. “And we’re looking to add in other services like catering and floral arrangements, so we can really scale upwards beyond just the space rental.”

Good reviews?

Like all new businesses offering online services, Eventup is dependent on word of mouth to help people feel comfortable listing their properties on the site. It only takes a few bad renters to trash a few venues or some properties that don’t come as advertised and Eventup could be quickly stuck with a toxic track record.

That possibility worries USC’s Bridges.

“You never know what you’re going to end up with when you go through websites sometimes,” Bridges said. “That problem needs to be overcome for venue owners to gain confidence that the lessors are legit. And vice versa.”

Adam said he’s aware of his company’s need for a spotless record, and though no disaster has happened, Eventup has a $1 million insurance coverage on each rental. It’s an important safeguard for a company that lists high-end properties, such as a three-story rooftop loft in Tribeca. But the Eventup bookings, which have thus far been used largely for corporate events, don’t exactly cater to the rock-star room-trashing crowd.

“We haven’t handled too many 21st birthdays yet,” Adam said. “We work more with a wedding, bar mitzvah or corporate event kind of audience.”