Apartment Search from Walk Score from Walk Score on Vimeo.

Commuting is expensive and time spent sitting in traffic is lost forever. Here are our favorite commuting stats:

• Over three quarters of home shoppers rate being within a 30 minute commute to work as important. (Source: National Association of Realtors)
• Commuters waste 4.2 billion hours and 2.8 billion gallons of gas in traffic per year. (Source: Texas Transportation Institute)
• The average American spends over $9,000 per year on their car. This is the equivalent of a $135,000 mortgage and the second largest expense for most households, costing more than food, clothing and health care. (Source: AAA)

To get started, visit walkscore.com/apartments and enter your work (or school) address, select your preferred mode of transportation, and tell us how long you’re willing to commute.

Apartment listings from craigslist are automatically sorted by estimated commute time and can be further filtered by Walk Score, price and size.

And if you don’t find what you’re looking for, we’ve integrated links to MyNewPlace and ForRent.com to search their national databases for nearby rental listings.

“Access to public transit and minimizing commute times are high-priority, quality of life issues for many renters. We’re very pleased to offer Walk Score users access to MyNewPlace’s extensive inventory of apartments and rental homes in virtually every neighborhood throughout the U.S.,” said Mark Moran, MyNewPlace SVP of Marketing

From WalkScore Blog

My post today on the OMG Blog.

We are partnering with MLS organizations to replace Homes.com listings sourced from services less reliable than the MLS. Through this partnership, all listings sourced from a local MLS are displayed on Homes.com with the new MLS Trusted badge.

This is interesting. Dominion Enterprises, the parent company of Homes.com, ForRent Media Solutions and a glut of other online classified sites is launching "MLS Trusted," a broker verification service.

I wonder if this will have the stated effect of actually refining the quality of property data and listings, or create another pay wall restricting consumers from directly accessing data. The goal seems to be transparency, but a pay-to-play, metaMLS, might result in the exact opposite effect, by letting brokers pay for visibility.

ForRent.com partners with RentWiki.com to increase consumer engagement and encourage feedback
Renters can now provide neighborhood feedback on leading apartment listing website

   For Rent Media Solutions™, a leading resource for apartment searches nationwide and operator of ForRent.com, a division of Dominion Enterprises, announces its exclusive partnership with RentWiki.com. The partnership introduces user-generated content to the leading multi-housing website.

“Consumers trust the unbiased opinion of other consumers,” said Brock MacLean, senior vice president of national sales and development. “According to a September 2010 study from the Pew Research Center, nearly one-fourth of U.S. adults say they have posted comments or reviews online about the products or services they buy. We embrace the opportunity this exclusive RentWiki partnership presents us to incorporate user-generated content into our site. This creates another platform for renters to communicate with each other. It also lets property managers monitor what is being said about the neighborhood around them.”

This functionality will also help increase visibility for nearby properties. Information from Neighborhood Wiki, one of RentWiki’s distinct types of user-generated content, is contributed by people who live in that particular area. Neighborhood Wiki allows current residents to post comments, and includes neighborhood information like an overview and pros and cons—as seen in the Dunwoody Reviews within the Greater Atlanta metro.

“The communications landscape is changing and RentWiki understands that social media is playing a major role in online communications,” said Robert Turnbull, co-founder and president of RentWiki.com. “RentWiki.com and ForRent.com are both well-known names among renters and property managers alike. We value the trust gained by renters and, through this partnership, welcome the opportunity to share their neighborhood feedback on ForRent.com.”

Yardi, a software provider for the multi-family industry has launched a rental website for renters to find apartments nationally. The new service is called RentCafe and says renters can “search apartment listings, compare and apply to your favorite apartment communities, and pay your rent online, all from RENTCafé. We’re saving you time while making apartment renting easier.”

For apartment advertisers, the service seems to be a freemium model where apartments can post for free and then pay on a per lease basis but it is rather unclear from the website.

At first glance it looks like a majority of the listings are populated by ForRent.com. The user interface is very clean and it has a mynewplace like map on the left hand side.

Traffic to the site seems to be very low according to compete.com. Compete has unique visitors for October at around 1,000 and then goes to nothing for Dec.