Online Apartment Locators: Which is the Best?
When I first moved to Houston, Apartments.com was my choice of apartment locators, and it was quite helpful in my search. The site was fairly easy to use, and it offered a large selection of apartments. I also like the way they lay out each page, with tabs for Overview, Community, Photos, Map and Management Company. Apartments.com was quite easy to navigate, and gave me enough information so that I could proactively search for the perfect apartment.
Pros: Layout and navigation are the two best features of Apartments.com. Each apartment has a table in which they list the names of each floorplan, the square footage, the price, the amount of bathrooms, the deposit, and a link with which prospective residents can contact the management office. They give the leasing office hours as well as the phone number and a brief description of each property.
Cons: Pop-ups are all over Apartments.com, which can be frustrating when you are consistently thumbing through pages and pages of possible apartments. The tab button sometimes leads strange places when you are trying to switch between fields on the search page, but this is hardly a large problem.
One of the most popular online apartment locators is arguably Rent.com because of its famous $100 gift card when you tell an apartment community you found them through their site. Owned by the same people who operate eBay, Rent.com is not as easy to use as Apartments.com, but it does have a more attractive layout. The search features are slightly limited, as it isn’t possible to search for the name of a complex, but you can search for an address or for apartments in close proximity to military bases, universities and companies.
Pros: The $100 reward is certainly a big plus, and Rent.com has a large selection of apartments. They also list the management companies for each of the properties, so you can look them up, as well. Despite the lack of a Property Name search cue, they do have a very sophistocated internal search engine.
Cons: From experience, it takes quite a while to receive your $100 reward card, but that’s to be expected. Many of the properties do not have floorplans or photos posted on Rent.com, which makes it difficult to get a sufficient idea of the property.
This is a lesser-known online apartment locator, but I think that it has been highly underrated. ForRent.com has unique searching capabilities that allow you to search based on a large number of criteria. Further, each property page is very simply laid-out and easy to follow. Photos are posted on a scrolling bar for easy reference, and they have “Virtual Tours” of most of their apartments.
Pros: The search capabilities are excellent, and ForRent.com gives a great many other resources as well, such as for moving and renting U-Haul trucks. They have floorplans, photos and descriptions for each property, and the site is extremely easy to navigate.
Cons: It isn’t as well-known and doesn’t have quite as many properties as Rent.com or Apartments.com. Sometimes, the search results get mixed up, and the “Area” search results aren’t always accurate.
