RateMyStudentRental Blog

In my earlier blog Out of the Dorms and Into Life (A Guide to Finding the Best Place to Live in College) I identified six steps to finding college housing that works for you and your lifestyle.

• Start Counting Your Benjamins!
• What Are Your Gotta-Have-Its?
• Can’t Live With Them, Can’t Live With-Out Them! (Roommates)
• So, Which Place Should I Choose?
• Commit Already!
• Live It Up!

Over the next few months I will be adding a new blog that talks a little more about each step so you can get a better understanding of the step.

Start Counting Your Benjamins!

Originally I wrote:

First, and most important to most students, is the cost of the rent. Hopefully as a student you have some sort of budget in mind for the next 4-5 years of your college career. Finding a place that is within your budget should not be too hard. Also, keep in mind that the theory that “you get what you pay for” isn't always true with student housing; we’ll get into that a little later.

Creating Your Budget & Managing Your Money

Now that you are a college student chances are you are fully enjoying the college experience which consists of more play and less work (after all your homework is done of course)! So, how do we have fun playing with out worry And, if you are working, super – this gives you more reason to manage your money, because you have more to manage.

Establishing a budget is pretty easy, it’s the part where you have to follow your budget that requires a little more self-discipline. Start off by determining your income and expenses.

It is easiest to break down your income and expenses on a month to month basis. Income is fairly easy to identify, since the main source is usually from a job, either full or part time.

Predicting your expenses should take a little thought and effort. For most accurate budgets, look at the last few months of your expenses, how much did you spend on the following activities/items (just to name a few):

• Tuition
• Rent
• Utilities – phone, internet
• Auto – gas, insurance, service
• Groceries
• Dining
• “going out”
• Entertainment – movies, sports
• Shopping – clothing, gadgets
• Emergency money!

Once you have identified and categorized some of your expenses you should prioritize them. What expenses can and should you try to trim? Which expenses are critical to your survival; like entertainment, no one likes to be bored! Just kidding – more like the food and shelter, those play a huge factor in your success in the classroom.

After you are comfortable with your priority and estimates for income and expenses you can compare the two.

Income – Expenses = +/-

If you are in the negative, maybe you should play with your numbers a bit until they look reasonable and calculate to be closer to a positive number, or at least zero!

When your budget looks like it works for you, pay attention to what you allocated for your housing or rent. Rental prices range across the country, ask around and do a little research on campus to find the averages of student housing, you can also use RateMyStudentRental (yeah, another plus, can you blame me, it’s a sweet site!) to filter rental results on your campus by price and check out the ratings and review from other students, is there any correlation between price and quality on your campus? Watch out for the great deals and landlords who have great reviews, a great rental, and an affordable monthly rent.

Using tools like Wasabe (who have a reputation for holding true to their Privacy Policy can help manage your budget and personal finances.

Being smart with your money is important. Keep the following tips in mind about how to spend your money:

• Try to avoid using credit cards.
• If you must use a credit card, pay it off each bill cylce.
• Have your weekly spending allowance in cash and only spend that...when it's gone, even it is Wednesday...wait until Monday to get more cash.
• Pay bills (cell phone, rent, credit card) as soon as the statement comes out so that you are not tempted to spend the money else where.

Reviewing your budget:

If you took the time to put a budget together than you are one step ahead of most. You budget will be most effective if you can stick to it and review how well you are doing. I use Quicken software and each month I input all of my expenses and categorize them (food, auto, clothing, entertainment....etc). Quicken lets you run reports and see how much you have in each category and it also reports income. You can see many different reports and graphs of your financials. This is a good monthly review, compare it to your budget and see where you need to or can reduce or increase spending.

And, I would be doing my Financial Markets Professor wrong if I didn't encourage you to put a little bit of money away into investments now. Whether stock markets (short term and risky) or mutual funds (long term and less risky), we are young as students and can benefit greatly by getting in the habit of investing now.

Happy Budgeting!

Upperclassman Grudge

You walk into your buddy’s apartment and you instantly know you’re standing in a good-enough-for-college-kids apartment. The makeshift bedroom walls are made out of leftover pieces of drywall with exposed seams. And the kitchen is made up of randomly assembled leftover cabinets, located with absolutely no rhyme or reason. The patchwork carpet remnants have seen better days, but do match the threadbare couches. Well matching at least in the sense that they’re all pretty crappy.

This mentality is dated. Of course some students will settle. You know, the Animal House types that just don’t care, but most students desire and have come to expect a little more. Living in good-enough-for-college-kids apartments is fun for a year, maybe two, but the fact is that students are spending more and more time in college. As the years pass, maturity increases and students are willing to pay you a little more for a quality place to call home for a while.

So what do students want?

Think home, minus the parents. Students today want you to give them fresh paint on the walls, crisp clean carpet, and a kitchen that has decent appliances. Students want a nice bathroom, and larger bedrooms. Often with upperclassmen you’ll find that five people in a house is too many. Finding two or three friends that you can live with is better than packing in five or six. That charm of the early college days wears thin after awhile and everyone is happier with more privacy.

So why should a landlord care?

You will reap the benefits of supplying premium housing to these students because these students are willing to pay more. A quality place to live is desirable to students, with fewer headaches for you and it will ultimately result in more cash flow. You will find that students are much more likely to respect a nice, well finished apartment than they do the good enough ones so you will be less likely to have to make expensive repairs.

Of course, there will always be a need for good enough, and the rentals will always be available, but the fact is there’s a growing and expanding market for higher quality, higher priced rentals. Those of you who make the leap, leaving good-enough-for-college-kids apartments behind will find yourselves in new territory. But that territory will have you feeling the benefits and tucking more cash in your billfold.

We want to announce that our landlord side of the website has just recently launched! March 21, 2008 our first landlord registered to the site. Since our launch to students we have been receiving many requests from landlords who were anxiously waiting to start utilizing our Free and Premium Services to grow their student rental business. We worked hard to get the landlord functions working so we could open our service up as soon as possible. We are still working in beta and we are continuously developing new services to offer to landlords to help them grow their business. Keep your eyes open for new features and changes to the site over time.

Registered landlords can utilize the following features:

Free

• Verify rental details
• Receive a HTML badge
• Upload 2 photos
• Flag for availability (immediately - 2 weeks, or this term - 2 months)
• Write a Profile Description
• Respond to student comments on your rentals profile

Premium Services

• Upload 15 photos
• Flag for availability

Coming Soon

• E-Lease
• E-Rent
• Customized branding
• Uplaod 3 videos

Check your landlord profile for pricing details. You can review our Refund Policy for more information.

We value each and every landlord returning to RateMyStudentRental with your confirmation code. Please note, that each rental has a confirmation code, for example, if you own three properties you will recieve three different confirmation codes. Each confirmation code is unique to each rental.

No Confirmation Code??

If you have not received a confirmation code and your rental is on our site, you should be receiving a code shortly. The confirmation code is sent via USPS to the address which is listed in public records at Home Info Max. By retrieving the owners address from Home Info Max we can assure that the confirmation code gets in the right person!

Rental Not Rated??

If your rental is not on the site and you want it to be, encourage your current or past student tenants to register at our site and rate their rentals. This will trigger a confirmation code to be sent to you. We are working on additional solutions to get you jump started with RateMyStudentRental

Your Business

We are looking forward to your participation and awareness of the student’s reviews and ratings, which will help you grow your business on campus. Together the RateMyStudentRental Team, students, and landlords will create safe, clean, premium housing on campus.

Please feel free to contact us anytime. We welcome feedback and comments and we arededicated to our customers.

Blake just wrote an excellent article called "A Safe Home is a Happy Home (well, it helps anyway)" with some very insightful tips on not getting your stuff stolen. His post mentions that Flint is consistently in the top 5 most dangerous cities in the US. Now, to be fair, there are some that say you should take these rankings with a grain of salt. But, as Blake's article mentions, we have seen many of our friends get their stuff stolen, so I thought I'd tell a couple funny (in a tragic sense) stories of our friends who found themselves no longer in possession of their possessions.

The Opposite of a Parting Gift: the Parting Take-Away

I have this one buddy, whose name escapes me at the moment, who decided after a year of going to school in Flint, that it wasn't for him anymore. He had just been accepted into another school elsewhere that started a few weeks after Kettering's semester. So a few weeks in, he packed up his stuff, ready to move out Sunday, but decided to first have one last hurrah Friday and Saturday night. It was like his last week of break all over again. But this was something more. It was like "no worries" partying coupled with a "screw you, Flint" attitude.

Unfortunately, he didn't plan on Flint answering right back to the screw you part. When he got back from partying Friday night, he found that his house had been broken into. His desktop computer, which he had all nicely packed and stacked, was gone, along with his guitar. He had unwittingly done half the burglar's job and made everything he owned easy to haul out of the window and back to the thief's evil lair (that's how I imagine thieves to be, don't you?).

Needless to say, his attitude for Saturday's night of debauchery had changed from "screw you, Flint" to "drown my sorrows in alcohol." Tough break, but such is the stigma of Flint.

At least the Thief Smells Good

Sometimes, you just have to wonder what was going through someone's head... I have another really good friend, Jim, who had an interesting experience getting his house broken into one night.

It's not hard to imagine the panic that goes through one's mind and takes control of your senses when you come home to realize that your sanctuary has been broken into. But try to imagine the confusion when you are filing the police report, and giving answers like this:

Police: Sir, what is the most valuable item missing from the house?
Jim: Um, that would be the Xbox (aside: this is pre-Xbox 360 era)
Police: No laptops, computers, or jewelry were stolen?
Jim: No sir, all of that is still there.
Police: Was anything else stolen?
Jim: Yes... my deodorant.
Police: I'm sorry?
Jim: My Old Spice deodorant was stolen.
Police: Um, are you sure you didn't just misplace it?
Jim: Yes, and you can definitely tell the burglar was in the bathroom. He stole my deodorant.
Police: And what was the value of this deodorant?
Jim: Well, it was less than half used. Probably $2 I guess...

Looking at the bright side though, at least the burglar would smell good for when he invited his hot date over to his evil lair to play his new Xbox. Only in Flint.

When selecting a rental, many students often ignore the safety factor. Sure the front door has a lock, and maybe even a deadbolt, but how safe are you really? Some of you have the benefit of being in a safe environment while attending school, but all of us at RateMyStudentRental chose Flint, MI to attend college. Maybe you don’t know, but Flint is consistently in the top five most dangerous cities by population. Think of it like this, we have one of the highest chances of being victim of a violent crime in the country. I guess some might consider us authorities on security.

So, after witnessing MANY of our friends having their houses and cars broken into, here are a few tips we've come up with to keep in mind when scoping out your place.

Read the rest of this entry »

Your Freshman year is almost over, and you can't wait to get out of your dorm hall where you have to share anything and everything personal - right down to your sleeping habits and that bar-sized refrigerator. Chances are you're at a big campus, so it's time to get out there and spread your wings. If you're like us, then one year of dorm life was enough, and you might need some tips on where to go from here.

Life in off-campus housing is great - you have some freedom! You can live by your own rules and on your own schedule (well, by “your own,” I mean your's and your roommates', whom you can now be much more selective over). There are usually a lot of rental houses and apartments to pick from around campus that all cater to students. Before you go out and sign a lease, though, there are a few things you should consider. We’ll walk through some issues to think about based on our past experiences, reviews we've seen through our site, and a bit of research.

Read the rest of this entry »

Hi, I'm Steve, the developer guy for RateMyStudentRental.com. Most of the articles you'll see coming from me on this blog will be talking about cool new features and ways to use the site. Now despite the fact that this site is pretty much the coolest thing to happen to student rentals since the invention of the beer-pong table, some people still need a little nudge in the right direction to try it out. So, I've put together this handy video to show you what we're all about.

Now, if that doesn't get you excited and wanting to tell your current landlord where to go, just so you can use our site to find your next place, then maybe this video, put together by an enthusiastic student user, will.

Well, it's official, the new RateMyStudentRental blog has been launched into orbit around the blogosphere. Three months after launching our site and providing students with an outlet to rant about their rentals, we've finally launched our platform with which to rant (well, sort of). Stay tuned for our thoughts on the latest trends in student living and funny stories from the college underground, and watch as we make that oh-so awkward transition from fun-loving college students to fun-starved business peeps (NEVER!).

Until then, don't get screwed! (unless it's on your terms)