Rent-Direct.com building on its name

Real Estate Weekly, Dec 6, 2000

Consumers know Rent-Direct.com as the leading online no-fee rental service in the New York Metropolitan area. More than 900 landlords know RentDirect.com as the online listing service that builds an illustrated portfolio of their properties as a free added service, as well as provide them with clients who have financial flexibility.

"The relationships with our landlord clients are the most important part of our business," said Ralph Barocas, principal with Apartments Illustrated, Inc., parent company of Rent-Direct.com. "Without the trust of landlords, we would have no service to offer consumers.

Landlords find that applicants generated from Rent-Direct.com have an additional 15 percent to spend on rent, or additional security because they don't pay a broker's fee.

"We are always happy with the applicants that have come from RentDirect.com," said Jeff Goldfarb with Finsbury Management. "We get a great deal of calls, and the applicants are much more serious than from other sources." Finsbury Management is based in Fort Lee, N.J., with properties throughout the Metropolitan area.

In addition, the applicants self-qualify themselves because of the detailed information included on the site. Before meeting with the landlord, applicants know the landlord's requirements on security deposit, income, and guarantor if necessary.

When a landlord or property owner lists for free their available apartments with Rent-Direct.com, they are also building an illustrated portfolio of their properties. At no cost to the landlord, a Rent-Direct.com photographer and graphic designer will go to the available apartment and photograph the interior and exterior of the building, take a 150-degree panorama shot of the entrance, and draw an accurate floorplan of the home. The images are then loaded into a password-protected area of a site just for them: www.Rent-Direct.com/owners. Landlords are able to use these images freely, for any use they wish.

"Features we offer the landlord such as the illustrated portfolio of projects are part of the overall benefit of customer service that we give our landlords," said Larry Rosenberg, principal with Apartments Illustrated, Inc. "Over 20 years in the New York rental market, we have come to understand the needs of the property owners--large and small -- and we seek to make the whole process smoother, faster and more convenient for them."

To offer landlords greater reach, Rent-Direct.com has been steadily adding to the list of online portals that they provide their New York and Metro area rental apartment content with, to increase the online exposure of each listing. Most recently they have added Homestore.com.

Other website portals RentDirect.com provides their rental content to are Move.com, Yahoo! Classifieds, RentandMove.com, Rent.net, SpringStreet.com, AptUSA.com, NYCampus.com, and coming soon, Moving.com. Consumers who go to any of these Web sites looking for apartments in the New York area will be searching on Rent-Direct.com's site directly.