adrianmott.com

How do you look for apartments to rent?  Do you walk into a real estate office and talk to an agent who will show you listings? Apartment rental agencies (and housing search for that matter) seems to be going the way of the travel agency – away – thanks to the many online services out there that have been popping up in recent years.  Many of the most popular services focus on real estate sales (Zillow, Redfin, Trulia, etc…), leaving somewhat of a hole in the market for purely rent-focused consumers.

New Boston startup The Rentables aims to fill that hole, by creating a site that lets you search for rental properties by filtering, comparing the places you’re interested in and then moving forward with the rental process.  In their words: “The Rentables is the new approach to property listings: Filter, Compare, Rent.”

The interface is clean and it works very well from the testing that I’ve done.  I really like the mouse hover feature that enables you to simply hover over a rental and get the details straight away.  The Google Maps and Street View interface for viewing rental locations is also sound, and reminds me of Housing Maps a little bit – a simple mashup site of Google Maps and Craigslist to show you similar information, but for far more regions (as it’s Craigslist powered).

Where The Rentables hopes to gain market share is through the compare feature that they offer.  When you’re searching for properties, you can continually add listings to ‘your favorities’, and then compare those listings in a table-like view, which is nice if you’re trying to decide between numerous spots.

One issue I have with the service though is the way that listings get entered into the system.  As of right now, the site is relying on property managers and other landlords to enter in the properties that they have for rent.  Property management companies do have the option of entering in all of their properties into The Rentables database, so when one becomes available they can easily ‘activate’ it.

While this is potentially an attractive feature for property management companies, I would still love to see the site do something similar to Housing Maps and grab listings form Craigslist.  Craigslist seems to be the first place fellow Gen Y’ers turn for rental listings (as well as being a hub for agents to list their properties) these days, so it seems natural to build any housing rental interface on top of it.

Another challenge that The Rentables faces is expanding their offering to other regions.  Right now, they’re only listing rentals in Boston and New England, but I would think that they need to get SF and NYC in there soon at the very least.

Interestingly, besides Housing Maps – there really aren’t a lot of other web services out there that are clean and nice enough from a usability standpoint to make me want to use – apartments.com and forrent.com are both disappointing to use (put them on a map guys!). I was impressed with The Rentables though and I’d recommend that any friend of mine looking for a spot take a look at the site before heading in to a real estate agency.

Here’s a look at Housing Maps’ traffic as well from Compete: