With spring semester nearly half over, many students are considering where they will live next year. While some are trying to decide between the South 40 and the Village, others have set their sights beyond those options and are thinking about moving off campus.
A new student-run apartment listing Web site, www.movingoffcampus.com, aims to simplify this endeavor. Jointly created by students from Washington University, Brown University and Tufts University, the site lists available apartments and provides contact information for property owners. It also allows students to search for roommates and includes a message board for students to share subleasing options.
The site allows students to search for all available housing listings based on a variety of categories like monthly rent, number of rooms and proximity to a given campus – currently listed are Washington University, Saint Louis University, Fontbonne University, Tufts University and Brown University.
Junior Mark Sawyier and sophomore Oliver Kremer, the Washington University students who founded the business, emphasized that their site differs from other housing search engines. Designed for students, it eliminates the hassle of brokerage fees as well as the inefficiency of sorting through listings far from a given campus. The site lists apartments within five to 15 minutes of a student’s school.
“One thing that is different about our Web site is that it targets university students. Our motto is that it is for students by students,” said Sawyier. “You might find apartments 20-30 minutes away from the school on other apartment search engines.”
In addition to Sawyier and Kremer, the business is now also run by students from Washington University, Brown University and Tufts University.
Sawyier, an international and area studies major, came up with the idea in summer 2005, while interning at an investment firm in New York. Sawyier, motivated by the success of his fellow students in their own business pursuits and his personal experience of searching for off-campus housing, began transforming his idea into a real business plan in September 2005.
“In fact, I was having a problem finding off-campus housing myself,” said Sawyier. “I knew that other students were having similar difficulties. I just felt like there were many inefficiencies in other apartment search engines. I wanted to do something about it.”
In October, Kremer, a business management major, began working with Sawyier. Being part of a start-up business as an aspiring business entrepreneur was especially exciting for Kremer.
“I love it,” said Kremer. “I have taken several business management courses in the business school. It talks about the strategies on how to manage your own business. I just love the fact that we control our own business.”
Sawyier and Kremer have both invested private funds to create the business. The Web site currently earns revenues from the property owners, who pay a nominal fee to list properties on the site.
Both Sawyier and Kremer hope to expand the site to other universities in the near future.
“We want to put as many schools on the map as possible.” said Sawyier. “This is a problem occurring everywhere. We want to make moving off campus as easy as possible.”