By TIFFANY PING
If anyone ever wants to sell an apartment contract, the first thing he or she would do is post a little three-by-five note card on the bulletin board, bottom floor of the Wilkinson Student Center.
Another strategy may be to post a flyer in the bathrooms around campus, 'Getting married! Must sell contract! Great ward, best roommates in the world, I'll even pay the deposit if you buy now.' Not to mention the nicely cut pull-tabs with the person's name and contact number.
Selling apartment contracts are a real difficulty for many students, but there is a quick solution-Housingseek.com. Housingseek.com was created about a year ago by two BYU students with the intent to provide a free service to students selling or looking for apartment contracts.
'It is focused on student rentals, helping people find housing,' said Nick Pasto, an art education major from Stockton, Calif., one of the partners of Housingseek.com. 'Not just to find it, but to understand what it is without actually having to go visit it.'
Knowing the challenges of finding housing from personal experience, Jonathan Chan assisted Pasto in creating the student-friendly site to find housing.
'It was really hard for me to find housing last year because I was using the BYU Web site and looking through The Daily Universe to find a place to live,' said Chan, majoring in computer science from Alberta, N.Y. 'It was really hard. The hardest thing is it takes a long time. We wanted to make it convenient, but also make it free because we are all starving students.'
What makes Housingseek.com different from other rental Web sites is how Chan and Pasto built the Web site geared toward college students with many user-friendly features. The site allows students to post their contract the way they want. Students are allowed to sell contracts with incentive or work out deals with other students, just as they would if they were posting it in an advertisement.
Another nice feature on Housingseek.com is ability for apartment complexes to post information about their apartments by using special media.
'The big distinguisher of our Web site from the BYU site is that it has media on it,' Pasto said. 'It has photographs of the apartments that the students can look at and decide if that is what they are looking for.'
A type of media offered on Housingseek.com is the virtual tour Chan designed himself. The tour allows the viewer to move from room to room and turn 360 degrees around each room.
Another type of media on the site is the movies. It shows auxiliaries available in the complexes. There is also music and scenes showing the social aspects of the apartments.
The site also allows for easy searching. A student may search for apartments by price range, location, BYU approved or apartment features.
Trevor Thompson, a BYU independent study student, said he found out about Housingseek.com when he saw the ad on a mouse pad in the computer labs. He is getting married this summer and trying to sell his contract.
Thompson said the site was user-friendly and easily accessible. It took him about 10 minutes to get to the Web site, set up an account and post his contract.
'One thing that was assuring to me was that they put on there, 'do not release any personal information,'' Thompson said. 'That helps to make me feel secure because you can put a contract on BYU's Web site and they ask for your personal information.'
Pasto mentioned the client's private information was a significant issue. Chan and Pasto did not want to post private information on the Internet. They wanted people to feel secure about using their Web site.
'One of our big concerns was keeping the students' information private,' Pasto said. 'What we came up with was a messaging system that works through our Web site. When a student registers on our site, they put some of their personal information in there. We keep that confidential. As a student goes on, they see a contract that this person has listed, they can click on a button that says 'send message' and it will send a private message through our contact info to that person. Then if they want to, they can exchange email addresses, but they don't have to.'
Housingseek.com makes its site available to the students for free by selling packages to apartment complexes. Any complex or private homeowners wanting to post their house or apartment on the site can buy a package where they post certain amount of pictures, a movie or a virtual tour.
Pasto and Chan plan on taking Housingseek.com to the level of franchising once it is well established in the Utah Valley. Their dream is to share this service with other college students across the nation.