RentCollegePads.com, which has been able to be used on campus for three months, is specifically designed to help students search for houses or apartments and to make the hunt easier on them.
The website provides students with housing options in various locations and price ranges. The housing companies listed include apartment complexes and landlords surrounding the university.
This differs from other, already available sites because it specifically targets areas surrounding campus instead of just the city.
“We are trying to provide an equal opportunity for these companies, this is not a business aimed to favor one company but to help everyone achieve success,” said Jeremy Schmidt, director of marketing for Rent College Pads.
Although the website has only been available to Ball State students for three months, more than 3,000 students have used the site to find homes, according to Google analytics.
In addition, the site has been able to find that 80 percent of users who visited the page in September were female, and 65 percent were female in November, which Schmidt said showed females were more inclined to look for housing earlier using the site.
Once students have set up an appointment to meet with a landlord, assistants with Rent College Pads will follow up with the students after to ensure a good experience while using the website.
Rent College Pads added Ball State University to their campus list in the fall in hopes of seeing the number of users grow by the end of this year.
“We are going through our largest growth spurt as a company, and by adding Ball State to our campus list has increased out numbers tremendously,” Schmidt said.
The off-campus housing search engine has now partnered with Ball State’s graduate school website and now offers a direct link to their site. The company wants to give graduate and international students ease when trying to find a place to stay during or after college.
Dan Kreitl from The Campus Edge, a Muncie apartment complex, also had a few positive things to say about the new site.
“The results we have seen at The Campus Edge have been great," Kreitl said. "They’ve provided excellent service to us, and have been able to connect with the BSU student population to generate great leads for us."