New service streamlines apartment searches

Champaign, Ill.-based Cazoodle, an online search technology startup, is entering the real estate rental servicing market. The service, launched in early February, aggregates rental listings — including houses, condos and apartment units — from many online sources and presents them in one interface.

The nationwide service, Place of Mine, uses the company’s search technology to create a database of millions of listings from thousands of websites, including listings sites, newspaper online classifieds sites, and property management sites for each search area.

"We realized that apartment rental information has been a poorly served market," said Cazoodle co-founder Kevin Chang. "There was a clear opportunity to more comprehensively serve users and take ‘search’ to the next level, making it work more closely to how things are done in the real world."

For each search area, which can be as narrow as a neighborhood or as broad as a city, Place of Mine displays the rental listings on a Google Map.

Users can then filter the search by number of bedrooms and bathrooms, price and property type, among other variables, with slider-bar controls to the left of the screen-centered map.

When one rental is selected, Place of Mine — using Cazoodle’s data-mining technology — displays the apartment’s comparative rent price, amenities and proximity to transit of rentals in that search area on a scale of 1 to 10.

The new service joins others, like New York City-based Rentenna, that are targeting the growing rental market as the U.S. homeownership rate retracts.