There was a time, I tell the younguns, when finding an off-campus apartment and a suitable roommate not only tested the diligence of your would-be researcher within, but also your skills at making paper flyers with little tear-off tags. For Generation Xbox, though, eBay has added a feature to its Rent.com that helps starry-eyed pre-frosh find leaky and close-to-pizza-joint housing as well as a roommate.
Toga Parties Made Easy With Rent.com
Editor’s Note: Are you in the online real estate business? How do you feel about eBay’s Rent.com service? Is there a better online listings service? Have any roommate horror stories? Tell us about them at WebProWorld.
WANTED: Roommate with kickin’ stereo, game console and TV, unlimited pizza budget, and lots of female “friends” with a certain moral flexibility. Apply in person at the corner pub, bring party references, Jimi Hendrix poster, and $5 for gas money.
As part of the promotion for the new service, Rent.com is offering a $100 Visa reward card to students who find and lease an apartment through the Internet Listing Site (ILS).
The ILS service is designed to help new-to-market renters find an apartment near their chosen school using its search-by-university feature that logs over 4,000 US colleges and universities.
Rent.com also offers a Roommates feature that allows students to preview potential roomies they can agree to hate later for girlfriend stealing, mess making, and all around poor hygiene. The service is free to register and search, and also offers students free messaging and listings.
After completing free registration on the Rent.com site, students can search for apartments by applying key filters – such as the number of bedrooms they would like, their preference for pets, their budget range, and their college or university – Rent.com in searches its database to deliver the properties that most closely match their requirements.
The college housing market is a $53 billion industry as the majority of college students choose off-campus housing over dormitories.
Of course, I tell new students if they want to be real iron-men professional academics they need to go old-school and beat the pavement-kind of like when Rocky went to the USSR and pumped iron in the barn. Yeah, Rocky was harsh.
