A new avenue in the housing search

For students looking for an apartment close to campus, Craigslist.com and Rent.com may be popular search engines.

Now, a new housing search site has been created specifically for students in the hopes of making online housing searches a headache of the past.

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Designed by a group of UW students and two of their peers at Microsoft, Spottage.com will help ease the burden of apartment hunting in the U-District for prospective student renters.

The site's founders said they plan to launch a polished version of their Web site within the next couple of days, though a beta version with listings is already up.

"We all went through a similar problem," said Prem Kumar, a technical account manager for Microsoft and Spottage's director of business. "It was [difficult] to find a good place to rent around campus, even with things like Craigslist [HTML_REMOVED] they just didn't look at every factor involved in a student's search."

To help fill the void left by other resources, the Spottage team interviewed a total of 500 students from the UW and other universities on the West Coast in order to find out what students disliked the most about the search process.

Most were irritated by sites like Rent.com because their listings were only accessible to users who signed up for accounts. Other issues included a lack of apartment listings near their school and infrequent updates.

The founders of Spottage hope to eliminate those problems, while continuing to mold their site through feedback from its student users. Users are not required to sign up before browsing the listings, and they may do so free of charge. Spottage.com also works closely with managers to ensure that listings are up to date.

However, one thing that Spottage will have in common with Rent.com is its reward policy: $100 dollars to every renter who signs a lease through the site's service.

"Managers ... that are under contract with us will give us a certain amount of money when a lease is signed," Kumar said. "We'll pass some of that money back to the students by giving them $100 for signing a sponsored lease with us."

The site's creators have also sought feedback from over a dozen landlords in the U-District, using one landlord as a mentor for their site.

"A lot of what my job entails is going out and ... building relationships with the managers in the surrounding areas of UW," said senior Darrick Morrison, Spottage's director of marketing. "It's kind of one of those chicken and the egg things; you need to have the managers and the listings before it becomes a viable site."

Among the site's most prominent features is a map-based search tool, which highlights each neighborhood's amenities [HTML_REMOVED] places like restaurants, coffee shops, grocery stores and even bars.

Morrison said a plan for bus route overlays is already in the works.

"On Rent.com you're going to look at the Seattle area, or on Craigslist maybe Seattle in general," Morrison said. "It comes up with a big list, and you really have to scour through it. Our site answers the questions that students really want to know: How close is it to campus? What's near it?"

Another tool, which was the inspiration for the site's name, is called "My Spots." When users find a particularly appealing listing, they can bookmark it to a collection of their favorite apartments for later reference. In the future, students will be able to share their selections with peers on Facebook.

So far, Spottage houses about 30 listings. Within the next three months, the site's founders expect that number to increase.

However, only user input can determine the future success of Spottage.

"We're students ourselves. ... We really designed the site just for students, not for anyone else," Morrison said. "There are a lot of sites that do what we do, but we're doing this for the students, and we're doing it for UW students. This is their site for locating off-site housing."

Reach reporter Maks Goldenshteyn at news@thedaily.washington.edu.