Website Review – ApartmentFinder.com

I used to move around a lot, so I’m already pretty fimilar with the company behind the ApartmentFinder.com.   I have grabbed many of their stout little apartment directories in front of Circle K and clipped the 1-month free coupons.  
It now seems weird that they even have those.   Who doesn’t look for apartments online?

The site is easy to use.   There is little doubt of how to search for apartments, and they obviously have the biggest selection.   The site is clean and easy to read.   It does have ads, which of course other sites like Craigslist doesn’t, but Craigslist doesn’t offer this level of selection and images.   And the ads appear to be well thought out.   And ad for checking my credit score before I apply for an apartment makes sense.   As does the ad for movers.

They have some good resources for each apartment, including maps and info about the area.   But I would like to see more details.   A link to Great Schools would be much appreciated.

I do lie the Send to Mobile feature.   I can easily see that being a great help when you want to send a few listings to your cell phone to check out while on the go.   An iPhone interface would be really cool.   It would also be cool if they had a feature that you could enter your number and click to be connected with the apartment complex (especially if the system remebered your number so you could easily call multiple apartments), and I bet they could even do a pay-per-call pricing from the apartment companies.

The only real issue I see is that their site doens’t validate (95 errors), so I would guess it’s not 508 compliant, which means that people with disabilities would have a problem reading the site with special browsers.   Since they are offering housing, I would think this would be a priority.  Ã‚   But maybe they have a work-around for this I’m not seeing.
Overall I would rate the site a   B-.    If they were validated, I would easily make the site a A-, and if they were to add a the call button and links to things like Wikipedia, Great Schools, and local cities, I would give it an A+.

[tags]apartments, apartmentfinder.com, wikipedia, great schools, mobile, iphone[/tags]