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!

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!

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
• Respond to student comments on your rentals profile

Premium Services

• Flag for availability (immediately - 2 weeks, or this term - 2 months, or next term - 5 months)
• Write a Profile Description
• Upload 15 photos

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 are dedicated to our customers.