Ofo Ezeugwu’s business started at Fox. And it keeps on growing.
In a late-night meeting in spring 2012, Ofo Ezeugwu, BBA ’13 and his Temple Student Government peers sat quietly as an idea came to him — what if he and TSG provided a way for students to rate their landlords, so future students knew what to expect before signing a lease?
In asking that question, Whose Your Landlord was born. “The goal of Whose Your Landlord is to bring quality to the rental experience,” said Ezeugwu, who at the time served as TSG’s vice president. “The goal is to make tomorrow better for student living.” Three years later, the website Whose Your Landlord serves more than 85,000 active users and features reviews and ratings of landlords in more than 100 U.S. cities. After sharing the idea, the Entrepreneurship major at the Fox School of Business took the first steps to starting his Yelp-like Web service for renters.
Ezeugwu, 23, realized it would take too much time to develop this service through the school and student government, so he immediately began creating a plan to launch Whose Your Landlord as a business. (Side note: “Whose” is an intentional grammatical error; Ezeugwu and his team chose the possessive form of the word in an attempt to return power in the decision-making process to the tenant.)
By summer 2012, Ezeugwu put together his team, consisting of Felix Addison and Nik Korablin. The three co-founders released a beta version of Whose Your Landlord to Temple, George Mason University, and University of Maryland students in October of that year. After overcoming some obstacles including limited resources and getting users’ reviews, Ezeugwu and his team launched the website in September 2013.
In 2015, Whose Your Landlord experienced a 156-percent growth rate. There are more than 3,000 reviews of more than 2,000 landlords in Philadelphia, New York, Washington, D.C., San Francisco and more.
Whose Your Landlord has also given Ezeugwu the chance to attend and speak at some remarkable events and engagements. The young CEO spoke on a panel last month at the White House’s “I Have a Dream Summit” and was one of 120 attendees at the event. Ezeugwu and Addison were invited to attend Google’s F50 Founder Night.
Ezeugwu and his platform have also been featured in local and national media like CBS Philly, TechCrunch.com and, most recently, Newsweek. Last November, Ezeugwu appeared on MSNBC’s “Elevator Pitch,” where he received a score of nine out of 10 from both of the show’s panelists.