Inman

Arizona opens homes to hurricane victims

Welcome Wagon, a division of Homestore Inc., today announced that its Web site, http://relief.welcomewagon.com/, now contains about 2,500 Arizona listings for available housing in shelters, churches, apartment complexes, single-family homes and senior facilities. The site also provides information about available housing nationally for those who prefer to settle elsewhere.

Homestore Inc. operates a network of home-search Web sites, including Realtor.com and HomeBuilder.com.

The new Web site provides current information from multiple housing-related sites, including HurricaneHousing.org, KatrinaHousing.org, KatrinaHome.com, Katrina-Relocation.com and HomeRentalAds.com. In addition to housing searches, the Web site also serves as a resource for information about a variety of organizations offering housing-related and other relief aid, including the American Red Cross, the Realtors Relief Foundation and HomeAid America.

“We are proud to take part in the relief effort,” Nathan Gill, regional president of media services, said in a statement. “This search tool takes thousands of available resources and brings them together in one simple interface. We applaud the whole-hearted effort Arizona is making to find shelter for these devastated refugees, and encourage any individual with available rooms or homes to add their information to the site.”

At http://relief.welcomewagon.com/, survivors of Hurricane Katrina and their friends and family, as well as relief agencies and other volunteers, can search a comprehensive database of available homes and sort by city and state, number of people, and length of stay. When a search is initiated, multiple other sites are simultaneously evaluated for matching search results, enabling users to identify a possible housing solution.

Individuals can post information about open beds, extra rooms, guesthouses and other temporary housing that they may have available at http://relief.welcomewagon.com/. Additional hurricane-relief resources can be added to this site free simply by sending e-mail to relief@welcomewagon.com.

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