Other apartment sites in Boston use the honor system when allowing realtors and landlords to list apartments.
At On Market Boston, our Non-Realtor, data staff verifies and enters all the apartments on this site.
The moment an apartment comes on the market, we link it to a valid, unique postal address thereby eliminating redundant listings.
This means that at On Market Boston, you can confidently search the most up-to-date, comprehensive inventory of available apartments in the Boston metro region. Stop wasting time calling on stale or fake apartment listings. Bottom line, all our apartments are real and have the most accurate info of any site out there.
To search apartments by all Universities, click the "View All" Button below.
OnMarketBoston Site Takes the Guesswork Out of the Boston Rental Market
New apartment rental Web site cuts through the clutter of a fragmented market
The Boston Realty Hub (BRH), a Somerville based web services provider, today announces the launch of OnMarketBoston.com, the region's only third-party verified apartment rental listing site.
OnMarketBoston.com (OMB) provides apartment hunters in the Boston Metro region with the most accurate, up-to-date information on the rental market. Using OMB's real-time listing of apartments, consumers can save time and complete an apartment search without sifting through duplicate or false listings.
"We wanted to create a one-stop apartment search web-site," said Dave Sherman, owner and manager of the Boston Realty Hub. "OnMarketBoston eliminates the thousands of duplicate property listings which clog other apartment listing sites. We aggregate listings from high-end rental agencies, building management companies, and individual landlords, into a single database, removing duplicates and trashing out-of-date information. What's left is what's really for rent in the Boston Metro region."
Accurate and Up-to-Date Listings
As more jobs are lost and the economy worsens in the Boston Metro area, vacancy rates will increase, but that doesn't mean people won't be looking for apartments. They will just be searching harder and more carefully for the better deals, cheaper rates.
OnMarketBoston maintains its own listing database, performing all data-entry and verification tasks. Validating each and every property using USPS postal addresses guarantees accuracy and eliminates redundancy. Once a listing is verified, OMB geocodes each location, providing consumers with accurate distances to locations of interest such as Universities, subway stops and images of nearby locations.
"The realtors who are part of our network understand that sharing real-time information on the web works. It's more efficient, and creates a better customer experience. Before the new OMB site, this wasn't possible," said Sherman. "Our property list is always expanding, and as the network grows, it creates more value for everyone--apartment hunters, landlords, agents and brokers."
ABOUT ONMARKETBOSTON.COM
On Market Boston by the Boston Realty Hub is the greater Boston metro region's only non-realtor, 3rd party verified apartment rental website. BRH is a data service that gathers information about available apartments directly from landlords and management companies, making this data available to realtors and apartment hunters.
Why Use OnMarketBoston?
January 13th, 2009
The Site We Want Wanted To Use Ourselves
We started OnMarketBoston with a single, stupidly simple idea. What if apartment hunters had access to a real-time database of all the rental properties in the metro region? They could search on-line for the perfect place, and not have to waste time and effort looking at unit after unit, with agent after agent, at agency after agency. We wanted to use that site ourselves. We assumed it had to exist. In the home buying market it's called an MLS.
Turns out, there was no such thing for rentals.
Representative Listings...or Bait and Switch?
Existing classified ad sites don't really work-because the data isn't organized. At first, agencies didn't want to share address information with third parties, so listings were posted on the honor system. This lack of any accountability meant that many postings are what Realtors call "representative listings".
Picture-less listings with a few vague details; units agents thought they could find once they had a prospect walk in the door.
Print-based marketing made representative listings mandatory-there was no way to keep the info up to date, and apartment hunters knew this. This system was ported as-is to the web. Hundreds of individual agency databases of stale, redundant, and representative listings were moved on-line and dumped into big steaming piles on-line.
Now better agencies make promises with their representative listings, in terms of price, size and location that they think they can keep; but less scrupulous agencies might post listings with details that are too good to be true. The Realtors we know wouldn't post a bait and switch listing. But the classified system was built in such a way that it often rewards the bad apples.
Unwittingly, the classified ad system had created a race to the bottom in terms of professional ethics. A system designed to save time and money, began to waste both, in copious quantities.
A Needle in a Haystack: the Redundancy Problem
Then came the next wave of web 2.0 sites, and renters began to demand real information-when they called on a property, they wanted to see pictures, and they wanted to actually see that property. Agents working on commission, posting to free classified sites, threw themselves into the breach. A single hot property, faxed or emailed to a dozen agencies with a dozen agents, could generate 250 listings on a classified site within 24 hours. (1 property x 12 agencies x 12 agents per agency = 244 free Internet classified listings.)
This is why some classified sites boast 10,000 listings. Do you really think there are 10,000 empty apartments in Boston? Good apartments? That's 10 million dollars of rent flushed down the toilet every month. This is a sign of a broken system.
A New Kind of Business
This problem couldn't be solved with technology alone. The rental market required the addition of a new way of doing business; the introduction of a trusted information agent to set a data standard, and to create, through economies of scale, an affordable data service which would allow Realtors, owners, and apartment hunters to create that site we all wanted in the first place.
The data service had to be separated from the sales and marketing efforts of individual agencies for there to be no conflicts of interest. The data service couldn't be a front for a single agency, period.
Creating trust with the best agencies, working through their business processes in order to protect their private data, while sharing the real-time data that only these agencies have access to, has taken years of painstaking effort, commitment, and passion. We've kept OMB in public beta mode while we amassed the relationships needed to create the most comprehensive single resource available on the web today for the Boston Metro Region.
In future articles we'll provide concrete proof of the current chaos in the real estate classifieds system, and show how we're working to build order out of this chaos, and create the best apartment hunting site possible.
