With spring around the corner, students campus-wide are starting to apply for housing with hopes of getting the best deal before the upcoming fall semester.
A new, free website called Cribspot.com launched on the Alabama campus in fall 2014. Founded and created at The University of Michigan 2013 by three college students, Cribspot is quickly becoming a resource for students in the hunt for housing.
“A major reason why finding off-campus housing is often difficult is because the best places are typically in high enough demand that they don’t make it online. We’re here to solve that,” said Tim Jones, co-founder and CTO of Cribspot. “We focus on getting as many houses and apartments as we can within a reasonable distance to campus.”
Trey Ross, a freshman majoring in aerospace engineering, said finding housing offcampus was a challenge and he plans on using Cribspot the next chance he gets.
“What I found the most difficult was the fact that we only got the most information from housing departments that the campus brought onto campus, so there were so many other options I didn’t know about,” he said.
Through Cribspot, students can search housing on a map or a list view. They can also narrow down their criteria by the number of beds, rent price, air-conditioning, parking, pets and other amenities.
“We recently launched a sublet feature so students can post and lease sublets from other students,” Jones said. “We focus on curating properties close to campus where college students would prefer to live.”
More than 1,500 University of Alabama students have already signed up for Cribspot, and Jones said he hopes to increase their numbers.
“We pride ourselves in getting more listings than anyone else,” Jones said. “The Alabama off-campus housing website charges $75 to post a rental property. As a result, they’re missing a lot of the best places. Cribspot is free, so we end up with even the houses and apartments that don’t need to pay to advertise.”
Students can also “pin” their favorite properties in order to organize what they’ve already searched. In addition, Cribspot offers a way to contact and email landlords through the site.
“We plan on continuing to grow to ultimately reach every college campus across the country,” Jones said. “A big focus in the near future will be on a Cribspot mobile app. Students do everything on their phones, and finding housing should be included in that. We also plan to bring the lease-signing process online. Eventually, students will be able to search for housing, sign leases and pay rent through Cribspot, all from their phones.”
For more information, visit www.cribspot.com/search/ua/rentals.
