Comparing rentals in a snap
Founded in May 2009 by DoubleClick founder and CEO, Kevin O’Connor alongside CeBotics CEO Scott Leonard, FindTheBest.com has now opened their comparison system to real estate rentals.
Backed with $6M in venture funding, this New York and San Francisco based startup calls itself the Kayak.com of life decisions, offering quick comparisons and rankings of technologies, home products, cars, and more. The system is powered by their “Data-Driven Content Platform (DDCP),” which is an “engine that blends proprietary technology with human curation to organize data in a consumer friendly format across a broad range of Comparisons.”
Their information sources range from public databases, to primary sources and expert sources that rank products, ultimately giving them a score. The company says their team of researchers ensure each entry is accurate. “In this way, we hope to empower users like you to make the best and most objective decision.”
The site is similar to Rentenna which seeks to give every apartment a score, and Naked Apartments which seeks to add transparency to apartment search. The trend of all three is to empower the rental consumer to make better decisions by being fully informed.
Because it has just launched, there is very little data available, only 125,791 total rental listings in the nation, and it appears that Oodle.com is the only data source so far, as gleaned from hovering over the contact button and seeing the redirect URL in the bottom of the browser. At this time, it is not much help, and it can never be quite as powerful as electronics because ratings of specific units is a feature tested and failed not only for time consumption reasons but for legal reasons.
Getting past the challenge of it having little use as of yet because of its size, where it does shine is that it is a slick user interface that allows consumers to do a real, legitimate, side-by-side comparison of data that feels more like a car search than a real estate search, and shows great promise. It will be interesting to watch the site grow and see if they add residential homes for sale to their offering in the future. Real estate is dominated by the big three sites (Realtor.com, Trulia and Zillow), but there is always room for improvement.
