by Curbed Staff
Nobody ever said renting is easy. Sure, there are brokers out there to help you on your way, but for every decent broker, there are three more who will try to charge you 17% of the annual rent on a 3BR thats actually a 2BR with a cardboard partition set up in the middle of one of the rooms. Hey, weve all been there.
Luckily, the internet provides renters with numerous apartment-researching options that prevent you from enduring the torture of having to speak to another human until its absolutely necessary. Intern Jeremiah Budlin has taken the liberty of attempting to rank some of those websites by using them to look for a 2BR in downtown Manhattan that costs no more than $4,000 per month (ha!) that he is going to move into with his imaginary girlfriend, Sharice (who sleeps in a separate bedroom, apparently.)
Rentenna, which launched just over a month ago is equally as easy to use as UrbanEdge, and the criteria users can search by is identical. Thats because Rentennas listings all come directly from UrbanEdge. The (urban) edge that UrbanEdge has is more listings. The edge (suburban edge? rural edge?) that Rentenna has is that it assigns each building a score out of 100 that is derived from a secret algorithm (much like the secret algorithm were using for this article) which takes value, user ratings, amenities, landlord, and neighborhood into account. Unfortunately, the most highly-ranked building that matched our criteria was rated 77/100, but it's possible that that's the best we could hope for in our price range.
Website design: 9
Listings found: 14
Strength of listings: 7
Overall: 8