Brent, I wonder if there is a way to market your product from a slightly different angle. What if you reached out to college students through housing fairs, housing work-shops, etc…as to build this gigantic grass-roots community of would be-renters. What if you could move them through the process using your site and ultimately land them in the specific micro-community they rent from. In other words load them up in your system as a general community member and then migrate them to the actual aptconnect community of the apartment building they rent from. Maybe there is a sort of rent.com stream you can play here. Maybe that is the bigger thought you have as your data base grows. If so, Awesome!! In not, maybe an opportunity as it sounds like a need right there in Houston.
Here is a blurb from the story that got me thinking;
Secondly, more resources are needed for housing searches. Yes, college
is a time of transition to adulthood, including learning how to do such
adult things as find housing, but realistically, the average 19- or
20-year-old moving off-campus for the first time knows
little-to-nothing about what to look for in an apartment or what’s
around campus. If Housing and Dining insists on kicking students
off-campus, then why does it provide so few off-campus housing
resources to these students? Yes, there are resources such as the
Off-Campus Housing Guide or college masters who assist students in
housing searches, but it seems that the apartment search is left
largely up to the student’s blind luck. Houston itself is affordable
compared to many other large cities, but the area around Rice is not.
This gives students a bit of a toss-up in housing choices – live nearby
campus and overpay or live further out somewhere more affordable in an
area of questionable safety? [Full story here]
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Interesting idea, Mike! We’ll have to look into it.
I love the idea of housing fairs, but I think that the workshop angle would fly better in academia-land. What about taking the time to lead a “renters rights” workshop once a semester on a campus? Sure, it means that you’d have to follow the rules you should be following anyway, but as a new renter, that says to me, “maybe I should rent with these guys, since they aren’t trying to take advantage of my ignorance…” and also, it makes it darn apparent to the student who’s sitting there that is getting screwed over by his current landlord exactly WHOM he needs to lease with next.
Just a thought…