We sat down with Reagan Amy at Campus Village Apartments at Kettering University and asked her a few questions about her experience with RateMyStudentRental.com as a property manager/landlord.  Check out the videos below!

Name One Thing You Like Most About RateMyStudentRental.com

What is Your Most Useful Tool on RateMyStudentRental.com

How does RateMyStudentRental.com Help with your Daily Job?

Last night I went up to Kettering University to assist with the Resident Assistants at Thompson Hall in an open discussion with freshman.  Our discussion covered topics related to off-campus life, how to find the right housing, what to expect and how to have a great and safe time!  The evening was fun and informational.  Overall the presentation was very similar to our February meeting which was re-capped in this blog post.

The students asked great questions, like:

Q: Will I have to sign an individual lease or will I have to sign a group lease and be accountable for my roommates actions?

My A: Of course this will vary from landlord to landlord and each lease is different so read carefully.  Some landlords do allow for individual leases to be singed, most have one lease the entire group signs.  Ultimately do your best to pick responsible roommates and respect the property.  If you have an issue with the way a landlord is handling his or her lease speak up.  From our experience many landlords are open to suggestions and with reasonable requests they will be accommodating to your needs or concerns.

And, a small tip, as a group do your best to build a relationship with the landlord through communication and respect.  When you promptly alert the landlords of issues with the house, pay rent on time, and are friendly, it makes getting that security deposit back at the end of the term/year a lot easier.

(That was a little bit longer that my real answer last night)

Q:  When landlords make major improvements to the house because of the responses left on RateMyStudentRental.com, does the rent increase as well?

My A: We have not seen that pattern of increasing rent due to major renovations or as a response to student comments on the website.  From my observations, the landlords are in a very competitive mode right now.  The good landlords, who care about their business and the students are working hard and investing in their properties to make a students experience more enjoyable and comfortable.  If they can provide housing that all the students want and they can achieve full capacity the landlords achieve their ROI most definitely.

Other tips for students in their search for housing…utilize the Student Watch List.  The student watch list is located on your home page when you log in as a student.  Here students can fill out a pretty simple form defining their needs for housing.  After it’s submitted if a rental becomes available that meets the needs of that student, an automated message is sent out alerting the student of the available rooms.  From that message students can communicate with landlords right on RateMyStudentRental.com to inquire about the available rooms.  We’re trying to make this process as simple as possible for students, landlords, and school officials.

If you are or your group is holding a meeting with students to discuss off-campus living, or how to search for housing or any other housing related meeting, the RateMyStudentRental.com team would be happy to join forces and share our knowledge with students.

Maybe you are a:

• First time landlord and you’ve never rented to students but want to start
• Current landlord and you have additional properties that are not on the site yet
• School official and you want to add rentals to your schools database on RateMyStudentRental.com for students to search through as they hunt for their next temporary dwelling
• Recent…or not so recent graduate and you no longer have your school email address but you’d like to add your past rentals to the website

No matter what your situation (unless you’re just a shameless spammer) we’ve expanded our business model to allow landlords, school officials and unregistered users to add their property to our database. This allows for more properties for students to choose from during the rental search, it helps expedite the students job of rating the rentals, as well as giving your property an outlet to be promoted.

Currently Registered Landlords & School Officials:

1. Log into your Landlord account.
2. Click the green ‘Add Rental’ tab.
3. Add the rental address, be sure to include the city and state.
4. Next, select the type of rental (house, dorm, apartment…) and choose the school that your rental is associated with.
5. We will go through our regular verification process and contact you ASAP with the confirmation code for the rental you just added.  You may be contacted through the messaging system on RateMyStudentRental.com

Unregistered/First Time Users and Landlords:

1. Go to www.ratemystudentrental.com
2. Click the green ‘Rate’ tab towards the top of the home page (Or click here) (if you are a student, please register with your school email address first).
3. Enter in the rental address, be sure to include the city and state.
4. Enter in the anti-spam code.
5. Next, select the type of rental (house, dorm, apartment…) and choose the school that your rental is associated with.
6. We will go through our verification process so that we can identify the landlord.  The landlord will receive an invitation and confirmation code shortly.

The rentals that are added with out reviews will be ready for students rate and will still show up in the seaches, landlords can add pictures, details and descriptions to provide potential student tenants with important information.  Increase your property profile’s viability and validity by encouraging past and/or current tentants to rate your rental as soon as possible.

Thank you for helping us create the ultimate student housing tool!

Landlords, did you know handfuls of surveys tell us that on average 90% + of students care about going Green, working for companies who practice Green in the work place, recycle, or just jumped on the bandwagon of “Going Green” in some way, shape, or form.

Some have taken the Green movement all the way into starting their own business.  A fellow student of Young Entrepreneurs, started a company called DryGreen, an eco-friendly carpet cleaning business out of East Lansing, MI.

Their website is very helpful, you can see any current specials in addition to entering in the total square footage of your rental to get an estimate on their service for your space.  Not only will you have the satisfaction of knowing you participated in the Green movement and you did your part of not polluting our earth with stinky chemicals but you’ll also be keeping some Green in your pockets.  DryGreen claims that their services cost 60% less than Chem Dry & 30% less than Stanley Steamer.

We all know, but sometimes don’t want to know what exactly is in that carpet at our student rental.  Landlords, we hope you do your part of cleaning the carpet between student turn-overs.  Working with DryGreen appears to be a win-win situation:  you are doing the Green thing, your costs can be reduced, and you’ll have happy students which leave great reviews on your rental.

We’re excited to announce the new RateMyStudentRental widget. Now landlords can take their rental properties with them and display them proudly on their own website or blog. Just login to your landlord account, and click the “Edit Rental Profile” tab and then the “Get Widget” button. You’ll see a code snippet that you can copy and paste into your own website or blog, or anywhere that allows javascript code to be insterted.

I’ve pasted a code snippet below:

Now get yours today!

On Wednesday January 15th I went back to our old stomping ground to join the Director of Student Housing and the Campus Village Apartments manager to talk to Freshmen at Kettering University about moving out of the dorms. The freshmen were a great audience and there was a lot of information shared!

Here is the presentation from the RateMyStudentRental Team!

You can get more details from these blog posts too! Moving Off-Campus & Safety Tips.

Thanks Reagan for the plug & Thanks Debbie for the invite!  If anyone has any questions about the presentation or you want to talk about your student housing options do not hesitate to contact us!

As some of you may have noticed, we recently rolled out a completely redesigned rental profile page, along with a few other updates to the site.

In addition to being easier to scan and much cleaner (we think), there are a few changes to the layout that landlords should be aware of.

The biggest change is the layout of the rental details (rent amount, deposit, and included amenities). Before, if a rental had not yet been reviewed and rated by at least one student, no information about that rental would be displayed either on the rental profile page or in the rental search results, whether the landlord had registered and entered info for that rental or not.

Old Rental Profile

New Rental Profile

Now, if the rental has rent and amenities info from the landlord, that info will always show up in the search results and in the rental profile.

We’ve also designed a much more compact way of visualizing the rental details, both according to the landlord, and from the student reviews, which takes about 1/5 the space on the rental profile as the table previously used. We’ll save the benefit of this for the next blog post though.

Old Profile - No Reviews

New Profile - No Reviews

The second main update to the profile layout is moving the Nearby Availabilities and Nearby Rentals to tabs that appear by default behind the Availabilities for that rental. If the rental has any active Availabilities or Sublets needed, they will appear in the foreground, with Nearby Availabilities and Rentals in the background tabs. If there are no active Availabilities or Sublets, the default foreground tab will be Nearby Availabilities.

Nearby Info in Background Tabs

This also has the added benefit of not separating the reviews for the the rental from the report card and the rest of the rental information.

And finally, we have added a thumbnail for each rental to the search results page, so that it’s immediately visible and easier to scan through search results, rather than before when the thumbnail was only visible when the user clicked “show on map”.

Old Rental Search Results

New Rental Search Results

So, what do you think of the new redesign? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments!

So, here’s a little college advice. Don’t just assume that unknown person in your house or apartment is just one of your roommates’ friends. This university student did just that and found herself without a laptop the next day.

A 21-year-old Lehigh University student found an unknown man seated at her desk in the wee hours of Friday morning in an off-campus house she shares with other students…
It turns out no one at the house knew the young man, and police believe he stole a laptop computer and accessories from the home in the 300 block of East Fifth Street.

Now, I can tell you from experience, this probably happens more than you’d think. One of my roommates disappeared from an apartment party we were at one Friday night when we were Sophomores, and we didn’t see him again until the next day. Thinking he may have gotten lucky, we started hounding him for details. Turns out, he decided it was time for bed and left. He stumbled into our apartment and fell asleep on the couch. The only problem was, he was in the wrong section of the apartments, and it wasn’t our apartment. No one at the other apartment even said anything, because they all thought we was one of the other roommates’ friends.

So, next time you see someone you don’t recognize in your place, go ahead and ask them who they are. They won’t take offense.

We are collecting survey results from students to find out what are the important factors you consider when deciding on your next student rental.  If you have 3-5 minutes to spare please take the survey to help us understand your thought process. The results will help us help landlords provide student rentals that actually meet your needs!  Thank you so much for your time!

Here is the survey @ SurveyGizmo.com

Look on Facebook and you will see many of your friends counting down the days left of class or before they get to go home!  The week or so leading up to the last week of school all students can think about are finals and making the grade, then once finals are over students rush to pack their belongings or pack to head home for break.  As anxious as you may be to leave campus for a few weeks take a couple extra steps to assure you have done everything you can to keep your rental and remaining  possessions safe and sound.

Student rental areas are known by criminals and these criminals know when you will most likely be gone for the holidays as well as other typical student behavior.  To help you protect yourself, we’ve compiled some tips on keeping your rental and your stuff safe when you’re not at your rental, based off of our experiences and from some ‘experts’ (if you will):

1. Take you precious possessions with you!  If you have any items that you absolutely can’t replace or can’t have out on the streets, take it with you!  The rest of your possessions should be put away.  Keep in mind, when a thief is running through your house they are most likely to take what is in sight or easy to get to.  Putting things away or out of sight will give your items a greater chance to stick around.  This reminds me, any bags or back-packs laying around will be something the thief will use to stuff full of goodies, so put those away too.  If you have a safe, see if your can bolt it down to the floor in your closet, a locked safe that can be carried away won’t do you or your possessions any good.
2. Lock it up!  Before leaving, make sure all your windows and doors are locked in the rental, including deadbolt locks! Sometimes, locking windows will not stop a criminal from using a brick or rock to get into your house; the harder you make it for them to break into your house the less likely you will have problems.  Criminals move quick and try to go un-noticed.  If they have to draw attention to themselves by breaking a window, they may opt to try your neighbors with hopes they left a window unlocked.
3. Speaking of breaking windows…pick up around the rental, not only before break but at all times.  Any decent-sized loose rocks, tools, or other objects could be used to break a window.  Having those types of items around is just asking for trouble!
4. Closing all blinds will keep peeping Toms out and won’t tempt criminals when they see your TV, stereo, speakers, collection of CDs (who has those anymore with iPods), DVDs etc.
5. Remember the movie, Home Alone, when it looked like there was an entire Christmas party in the living room of the nearly vacant home?  That’s a bit extreme, but leaving a few lights on in different rooms may give the impression someone is home. You can always ask your landlord to invest in timers for lights in several of the rooms so that they only come on at dusk (as to not waste energy) and turn on and off in different rooms on different nights or through out the night, just in case someone is really keeping an eye on your pad.
6. Don’t leave trash and/or trash cans out at the road.  Setting trash out a few days early because you’re leaving for the week is a green flag for criminals, same as empty trash cans sitting by the road waiting for you to come home to take them back to the garage.  Tips:  If you’re going to miss trash day by a few days just let it build up until next time you come back or ask your landlord if they will come by and set out trash/pick up the cans.
7. Ask you landlord and campus safety to check on the house a couple times during the week.

You shouldn’t only be concerned about deterring criminals from your rental, but there are also a few other tips you can follow to be a responsible tenant:

1. Turn off and unplug unnecessary electronics or any appliances that may be pulling power.  This not only keeps the utility bill lower for you or your landlord, but it’s also a good way to be a little more green.
2. Turn the heat down, NOT off!  Keeping your house at a chilly 55 degrees Fahrenheit will keep pipes from freezing or bursting, which will make a huge mess of your house and either cost you or your landlord a lot of money.  Keeping your place at 55 degrees won’t cost much and it will keep everything in the house (except roommates/pets) at just the right temperature.

These are just a few tips I’ve compiled from experiences over time.  The best advice is use common sense and be aware of the possibilities. And, remember that your landlords should be just as concerned about keeping your rental safe from potential crime.  So, don’t hesitate to talk to your landlord and let them know when you and your roommates will be out of town.