I ran across an interesting apartment site (and blog) the other day. I emailed back and forth with Arpit Jain and he explains the site with the following:

To help the users searching for rental apartments in a location, we are developing an apartment search engine that can automatically crawl thousands of apartment listings from all over the Web. Just like what Trulia does for real-estate or Google does for web pages, we are doing it for apartment rentals. You can visit the site at: apartments.cazoodle.com.

Seems like this model is taking off.

I think they need to fix the US map on the home page however, I wanted to use it as navagation not voting.

I am offering free neighborhood videos that are branded to your property management or real estate agent web site.

Here is an example of first video I did for Superior Colorado. The best way to describe what a “neighborhood video” is is to watch one.

Superior CO

I am only offering this in the Denver / Boulder / Breckenridge metro areas right now.

Breckenridge CO

Bend OR

To get more info and sign up for one please visit my neighborhood videos page.

13th Interview with Marc Cunningham of Grace Management & Investment. You can see all the others on PMDave.com

9th Interview with Marc Cunningham of Grace Management & Investment. You can see all the others on PMDave.com

I posted this interview on my PMDave.com site, but thought people that read this blog might enjoy this one.

I just got off the phone with Aaron Hassen of RentBlurb.com. He is looking for a buyer of his regional rental site for the Orlando area which ranks pretty well on Google.

His site is done in PHP.

If you know anyone that is interested, have them contact Aaron on his contact form.

It is a little sad to see a regional site looking to sell.

Update: I just got this from Aaron:

As you are aware, your blog is highly influential and monitored by major players in our industry. With your help we have now received a number of bids to purchase our site. I’m writing today to inform you and your audience that this Friday, August 29th will be the last day we will be accepting bids for the purchase of RentBlurb.com. After Friday we will begin the process of selecting a buyer.

Just wanted my users to know that RentVine is clean of any suspicious malware according to Google. Always nice when Google has something nice to say about your site.

What would be cool is to put this in a seal format and place it on my About Us page to help with confidence for my site.

I love studying what is going on in the vacation rental space because it is so closely related to my niche of home rentals. I have been looking over FlipKey.com and thought I would put my thoughts in a blog post.

My first impression is that is has almost a Oodle.com feel to it, perhaps it is the color scheme or the filtering processes on the right sidebar - I am not sure.

But I always admire sites like this one that have the guts to post reviews about properties like apartmentratings.com does. Anytime you put up reviews you are going to tick someone off. Clearly the site is built for the person looking for a place to stay - which I think is a great approach. But you need thick skin from all the vacation property owners about all the comment you will get.

I know that HomeAway.com that owns VRBO has a rating system on their site, but the rating is based off the accuracy of the info the owner provided and not the person’s experience at the vacation rental. I know if I am looking for a vacation rental I would love to hear what others thought of it before I rented it out.

I spoke with TJ Mahony from FlipKey and he gave me some insight on the name of the site which I like:

We want to help people feel more comfortable renting someone else’s home and the word “Key” is synonymous with security… Because the vacation rental experience is substantially more personal than staying in a cookie cutter hotel, we want people to feel confident about sharing / staying in each other’s homes. As a result, we choose “FlipKey” as our name to conjure images of someone ‘flipping’ their house keys, stories and personal experiences with a rental home to someone else…. It’s all about community and trust.