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Cribspot (YC W15) is a search engine for college housing

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Re: Cribspot (YC W15) is a search engine for college housing

#4

Post by padobson »

I'd love to know how you have gone about getting the initial sublets on there. Was it scraping other sites like Zillow and Craigslist?

I just posted one of my apartments expecting to be the only one in the area (I'm the only host on Airbnb in my city limits), and there were already four other apartments there.

Re: Cribspot (YC W15) is a search engine for college housing

#5

Post by timjones »

padobson wrote: post #4

I'd love to know how you have gone about getting the initial sublets on there. Was it scraping other sites like Zillow and Craigslist? I just posted one of my apartments expecting to be the only one in the area (I'm the only host on Airbnb in my city limits), and there were already four other apartments there.

All sublets are posted by our users. We haven't had to scrape from other sources.

Airbnb doesn't typically have a ton of supply in most of our smaller college towns. We get a lot of sublets posted partially because there aren't a lot of great resources outside of Craigslist.

Re: Cribspot (YC W15) is a search engine for college housing

#7

Post by brettbl »

My friend actually mentioned how useful this would be! One of the difficulties they may face though, at least in a market like mine (Boulder, CO) may be indexing and working with the housing that is already organized by rental agencies. There's three large ones where I'm at and I cant imagine they would make it very easy, especially if Cribspot wants to take some of the responsibilities from the agencies, responsibility that the landlords pay the agencies to take care of. It will be interesting to see how crib spot deals with this aspect considering these agencies run so much housing around here

Re: Cribspot (YC W15) is a search engine for college housing

#9

Post by timjones »

gatsby wrote: post #2

Congrats on the launch! Has it been challenging to get landlords to agree to a common rental application? What's the plan to differentiate from companies like cozy.co in the application/leases/rent-payment space?

Thanks!

As with anything, it's been challenging for some and rather easy for others. Our success so far is partially due to the fact that we have existing relationships with a ton of landlords. They know we send them leads and already trust our brand.

Most landlords in our markets don't use much software. We're primarily renter-focused, starting with lightweight tools focused on helping smaller property managers. Again, our existing relationships and the fact that we're already generating a significant percentage of their leads really help our ability to get property managers on board.

Re: Cribspot (YC W15) is a search engine for college housing

#10

Post by timjones »

brettbl wrote: post #7

My friend actually mentioned how useful this would be! One of the difficulties they may face though, at least in a market like mine (Boulder, CO) may be indexing and working with the housing that is already organized by rental agencies. There's three large ones where I'm at and I cant imagine they would make it very easy, especially if Cribspot wants to take some of the responsibilities from the agencies, responsibil…

I'm glad you think we're useful!

Our number one focus is solving the student problem. We don't intent to take responsibilities away from these agencies, but rather to make it easier to fulfill them. We make it easier for them to fill their properties faster at no cost to them. Generally property management companies have received this very well.

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