New Apartment Rental Search Website Launches

Ever heard of Zumper? You have if you live in San Francisco, NYC or Chicago, where the site was live since its debut launch in 2012. Now it’s going national, bringing some competition (assumedly) to Craigslist due to two key factors:

1. It’s mobile-first
2. It only allows posts from “verified” landlords, brokers and property managers

It seems the site is still a little buggy on a desktop or laptop computer in terms of clicking and images. Also, information from “verified” sources, such as property managers or owners of established rental buildings, is the easiest to come by to begin with, so it’s not very exciting to open up the map and see that those comprise the majority of the results.

Screenshot of Zumper’s interface

And it does limit things. One rental in Graduate Hospital? That’s not very helpful if you’re more committed to the neighborhood than to the verification. At this point, many people have become Craigslist-savvy enough to know when an ad is a scam and when it’s not. When in doubt, Trulia and Zillow rentals occupy a happy medium.

The iOS app will be available in a few weeks, so perhaps the mobile app is better. For now, to give it a try, go to www.zumper.com.