Searching for an Apartment with your Cell Phone

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Searching for an Apartment with your Cell Phone

Oh My Apartment · Jan 5, 2009

People spend a lot of time on the go these days, making it harder to dedicate time to searching for a new apartment at their home computer. Instead, it’s far more likely that an apartment hunter will squeeze in a search during the commute to work or during a few minutes waiting if he or she has a phone capable of browsing online. But most websites just aren’t easy to use on a phone: classified listings may be impossible to read on such a small screen and few sites dedicated to aggregating apartment listings have been optimized for use on a mobile browser.

One site stands out from the crowd, however, in its efforts to offer mobile browsing options. Apartments.com allows mobile users to conduct searches from their phone as if they were seated at a desktop computer — and scroll through the results. Access it on http://m.apts.com/ which for some reason we could only find through a Google search and not from a link on their site.

A few features stand out as particularly useful for mobile browsers: you can immediately get directions to a particular apartment building and you can text information to your phone from any computer you’re browsing listings on. And, depending on what kind of phone you’re using, you can place a phone call to an apartment manager from the website — a feature that simply makes the whole process much easier, eliminating the need to write down a phone number just to immediately punch it back into your phone.

Being able to immediately get directions to an apartment has quite a few benefits: many apartment hunters will drive by a complex even if the management office isn’t open, in order to eliminate some options based on neighborhood and outer appearance. If you can get directions, you can do so immediately, rather than having to go home, get directions and then set out again. The ability to text information to your phone also makes it easier to leave your home computer behind. You can conduct your apartment search on whatever computer is handy and still have information available on a tool that you always carry with you — without having to print out a whole stack of papers.

All this accessibility would mean little, of course, if Apartments.com did not have a wide variety of apartments for prospective tenants to look at. But because an apartment-hunter can access information about more than 3 million rental units just by visiting one site, the addition of mobile access makes Apartments.com a very useful tool for any apartment hunter in a hurry.

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