Apartment Hunting: 50+ Tools for Renters & Landlords

I found this article on Mashable and it is chocked full of so many web resources that I felt I should share it with you.






The Internet is filled with websites and services that can help you find a new place, but sorting through them can be more frustrating than the apartment hunting process itself. Whether you’re planning a move across town, relocating for a job, or just need to find an apartment with cheaper rent, we’ve put together over 50 tools to help make the process easier.

If, on the other hand, you’re a landlord looking to rent a property, we’ve included a few tools specifically for you. Also note that almost all of the listing sites we’ve provided for renters invite landlords to add vacancies, quite a few of them for free.

Rental Management

GetPropertize.com - Geared to helping an individual with property to rent, Propertize helps you track income & expenses as well as helping you generate your tax reports.

OnsitePropertyManager.com - Multi-featured property management software that also includes nightly back-ups of your data.

Property-Management.Buildium.com - A full-featured system that prints checks, makes work orders from online maintenance requests, allow residents to pay securely online and more.

Rentomatic.com - Offers both free and paid plans, can assist you in advertising, automating rent collection, track maintenance and more.

RentYield.com - Lets you manage your vendors as well as your tenants, track the performance of your properties and more.

TenantMarket.com - Helps landlords to locate tenants for their vacant properties.

The above are just a few of the 50+ tools and resources provided by Sean P. Aune. Sean is Mashable's Lead Features Writer, responsible for our ongoing, almost daily round-ups of the best resources about different Web topics.

To contact me visit me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/SeanDreznin

30 topics to focus on in your blog

“Should we have a property blog?”

Blogging isn't for everyone, but I think there are lots of reasons why the answer is absolutely YES.



If you have a property blog, or if you’ve thought about writing one, but don’t think you have enough ideas to write about, here are 30 ideas to get you started:

1. How to get the most from our property management team.
2. Recommend an improvement to our community.
3. What kinds of community events would interest you most?
4. Exciting updates or changes coming in future months.
5. How to decorate a small space.

6. Upcoming events, coupons and offers for the next two weeks.
7. A little bit about us.
8. Best kept secrets in our neighborhood.
9. Best place to get a beer, find home accessories, watch the fireworks, etc.
10. Photos from this month’s community party or meetup.
11. Video: A day in the life of our service technicians. (You could also post this on your Careers page.)
12. Our residents rock!
13. We support these causes/non-profits, and here’s why.
14. Tips to lower your utility bills. (You could interview someone from the local utility company.)
15. Have you seen our community garden, dog park, fitness room, whatever.
16. How we handle your disputes or complaints.
17. Anything that builds on a recent piece in your resident newsletter. (Use this both ways — promote recent blog posts in your newsletter.)
18. How to handle a difficult neighbor.
19. Can you recommend a better process for this?
20. We’re sorry, and here’s how we’ll handle things next time.
21. Report from our resident community review board.
22. We hate to see you go, but if you have to leave, here are some tips when preparing for move-out. (Too much?)
23. Need to talk to us? Friend us on Facebook (or Myspace, or Twitter or… You get the point.)





For the remaining topics, please click on the title above to visit the original story.

Seiders, Witten Predict Multifamily Starts to Fall Off

Source: MULTIFAMILY EXECUTIVE News Service
Publication date: October 23, 2008

By Les Shaver

Financing for new apartment projects is almost impossible to find. Building materials costs continue to rise. And the shaky economy means that many of these buildings will open to uncertain demand. Yet, after dipping below 200,000 units in early 2007, apartment starts to date are now back above that magic number.

So what gives?

Right now, projects that were already in the pipeline are driving up starts, but that number will come down. At least that was the consensus reached by Ron Witten, founder of Witten Advisors, an apartment market advisory firm, and Dave Seiders, chief economist for the National Association of Home Builders, during Wednesday's NAHB Fall Construction Forecast.

"We don't think this is a sustained trend," Witten said.

The decline in starts will likely come soon. Witten predicts that by 2011, starts could fall to around 125,000 units—numbers not seen since 1993. "We're going to be in for a couple of years of deterioration in multifamily starts," Witten added.

At the core of this drop-off is financing. The amount of equity needed to completed apartment construction deals has risen significantly. During the boom, apartment developers could get by with 25 percent equity or less on deals. Now, lenders are asking for around 40 percent equity. And even with financing, apartment owners don't know what the economy will look like when the properties open in a year or two.

"A decision to start today exposes me to a lot of risk going forward," Witten said.

The reality is that, right now, anything that opens faces a lot of competition. There are more than 1 million excess housing units on the market. That's down from the 1.2 million on the market earlier in the year.

Whether these housing units are for-sale or rentals, apartment owners should be concerned (even though Witten did acknowledge single-family rentals were losing their appeal because of their distance from the urban core and rising commuting costs). "It's pretty fluid whether I'm renting or selling my home, depending on who knocks on the door," Witten said.

Come 2009, Witten doesn't see a lot of interest in this excess inventory. "We'll make very little progress in excess inventory in most of 2009," he said.

By 2010, however, Witten thinks much of the excess inventory will be burned off. With little new construction coming online, that bodes well in the long-term for apartment owners—provided job losses didn't cut too deep. "The fundamentals are relatively good in the apartment business," Witten said.