The New York apartment scene
In New York City, apartment hunting is much more complicated and competitive than in other markets, requiring a lot of money up front and a long list of other New Yorkers interested in the same apartment. We’ve shared tools for agents and consumers in NYC to use to simplify the process, but today, we are attracted to a young startup called Rentenna.com which is a free service to help apartment hunters.
Rentenna has a unique twist on the process and has introduced the “Rentenna Score” which helps hunters to “filter out crappy (overpriced, run-down, far from subway, bed-buggy)” units on the market. Additionally, users can see where friends they are connected to on Facebook have lived to get their direct opinion and find out what they recommend, making a play for the popularity of social recommendations.
The company was built by with the expertise of a New York City rental agent combined with the coding and tech experience of the other three partners who have combined “the human knowledge of someone who knows the ups and downs of renting in NYC and quantified it using algorithms, maths, robots, lasers, monkeys,” as they describe it.
Their website copy is edgy and (dare we say?) hip and seek to connect consumers with the apartment in town that is right for them so they don’t have to fall into the trap of creating dozens of spreadsheets of their research and spending exorbitant amounts of time on hunting when they can just use Rentenna’s algorithms and the resident’s own social graph to save time and get better data.
“At Rentenna,” the company says, “our mission is to make apartment hunting as easy as possible. We research all the important things about a building that you’d normally have to search for on your own, across any number of websites. We then weigh all these pieces of data against each other and condense the whole mess into a single number, the Rentenna Score. Using our score, you can quickly hone in on the best rentals in the city that match your search criteria.”
Voila, New Yorkers, check out Rentenna.com and let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
