Archive for the ‘Landlords’ Category

I am happy to report that after only one month there are over 200 apartments listed for rent in Vermont on GridGuide.com.  It is pretty neat to see new users signing up that I have never contacted.  In the last week there has been at least one new landlord user each day.  I am happy to see the site starting to catch on with landlords, but totally blown away by the response from perspective tenants.  The heaviest traffic on the site so far was yesterday 11/9/08, and there were 2,732 pageviews (in one day)!!  My goal is to get 1 million page view in the first year.  Based on the rate of growth thus far that should not be out of reach.  Thanks a lot to all the landlords, friends, that signed on early.  If you would like to see that traffic stats from day 1 – today click this link below to see the Google Analytics report:
analytics_rentalsgridguidecom_20081007-20081110_pageviewsreport

Thanks, for visiting this blog.  I hope your find GridGuide.com to be useful.

Are you thinking about investing in rental property?  I read an good article that talks about some of the positive aspects of real estate investing.  This article titled “Getting into Real Estate Investing” was written by Julie Haley, Julie is a real estate agent in Georgia.  She makes a number of great arguments for investing in rental property.  Dispite all of these great arguments, there are certainly many arguments not to invest in real estate.  I think the biggest single downfall of unsuccessful real estate investors is buying too quickly.  Take your time and really try to understand the numbers, the cash flow, be conservative in your estimates.  Don’t buy something without either immediate positive cash flow, or in the near term.

Other than the single user type sites I mentioned in the last blog, there are also numerous other sites that charge landlords to list their apartments.  If you are not able to find the apartment or house you looking for on GridGuide.com, check some of these sites out:

• www.burlingtonfreepress.com/ via www.apartments.com
• www.7dspot.com
• http://burlington.craigslist.org/apa/
• http://burlington.kijiji.com/
• www.burlingtonapartments.net
• www.vermontapartmentowners.org/apartment_listings/
• www.burlingtonrent.com
• www.rentals.com/Vermont
• www.campusrent.com/vermont_apartments.cfm
• www.vtrents.net
• www.apartmentsource.com/states/VT/Burlington.html
• www.rent.com/rentals/vermont/
• www.apartments.com
• www.apartmentfinder.com
• www.apartmentguide.com
• www.Rent.com
• ….

Good hunting!  Thanks for reading.

Finding apartments in Burlington VT can be challenging. Burlington historically has relatively low vacancy. Surprisingly, about 70% of the housing units in Burlington are rental units. That is due in part by the colleges in Burlington. The colleges in the Burlington Area do not house all of there students on campus and thus there is a large student demand for off-campus housing. Some of the area colleges are:
University of Vermont -Burlington VT
Champlain College -Burlington VT
St. Michaels College -Colchester VT

I have received a lot of positive feedback about this website. We are just completing a round of updates to the site. One feature I really like is the quick information you can get from the “grid control”. Anyone using the site can now select their State, and Area (City), and all of the other search fields below: (Heat included, dogs allowed, etc.) show the number of listings available that meet that parameter. This is a huge improvement because it prevent users from making selections that return no results. Additionally, now when check any of the boxes the grid automatically updates. I would suggest playing around with it, and post a comment here is you have any further ideas of how we can improve the site! Thanks

Craigslist is a great resource for landlords trying to rent their apartments. The best thing about Craigslist is that it has become the go to place for free advertising, and you can count on a lot of eyes seeing you listing. There is however a lot the could be improved upon. That is what prompted me to build the web site www.gridguide.com.

It has been a long road. GridGuide.com is finally up and running! Finding apartments for rent in Burlington, or anywhere else in Vermont, just got a bit easier. I hope people will like this free resource. Our home page displays the available inventory of apartments in a much different format than you may be used to. We use a grid, basically an interactive spreadsheet, to display the apartments. This allows the user in one screenshot to see how many apartments, houses, or condos are available for rent in any given month (from the current month up to 12 months in advance), and the various unit sizes (number of bedrooms). For example if you want to look for 3 bedroom apartments available in June of 2009 you simply look at the cell in the grid that corresponds with June 2009, and 3 bedroom. There will be a number in that cell, that number represents to number of available units. Simply click that number in that cell, and you will see a list view of all of the results. From there you can select any listing you are interested in and go into the full detail view. The detail view gives you convenient options like a form to e mail the landlord, an online rental application, integrate google location maps, and a whole lot more. I hope you enjoy. Please keep in mind that this is our “beta” site. This simply means we just launched, and that we are continually fixing small bugs and refining the site. If you discover any problems with the site, or needed improvements, please post a comment here!! Thanks, and enjoy.