Will an Online System
Aid Apartment Firms?

See an apartment you like while searching online and hope someone else doesn't grab it before you? Click and reserve it.

Taking cues from the travel industry, a number of landlords and apartment-search companies are rolling out online programs that allow potential renters to reserve, or put on hold, an apartment. The process is similar to reserving an airline ticket or a hotel room online.

The system, created by Realty DataTrust Corp., a Scottsdale, Ariz., apartment-data company, is the latest bell and whistle apartment owners are employing to woo renters.

A customer goes to an online apartment-search site -- such as ApartmentGuide.com -- or the Web site of an apartment owner -- such as www.homeproperties.com -- then clicks a "check availability" button for a listed apartment community. The customer can view pictures of apartment units and click "Request to hold" to claim one.

Customers would then pay a $9.95 fee by credit card and submit to an instant online credit check to "prequalify" for the apartment. If you have paid and pass the screening, any apartment unit you put on hold is supposed to be taken off the property listings so no one else can see it.

Customers can reserve as many apartments as they please but will have to shell out $9.95 for each reservation if they want the apartments taken out of inventory.

As an incentive to use the reservation system, many landlords will give renters who pay the fee and end up taking an apartment between $50 and $200 off the first month's rent.

Once the apartment is reserved, the landlord contacts the prospective tenant, often within 24 hours. The parties negotiate from there. The landlord isn't supposed to show the reserved apartment to anyone else unless negotiations break down.

Home Properties of New York Inc., which owns 41,508 apartments in and around Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore, Washington, Philadelphia, Boston and New York City, decided to use Realty DataTrust's system for about 5,200 apartments in Detroit last month and about 5,300 units in Baltimore last week. The Rochester, N.Y., real-estate investment trust plans to make the online-reservation option available for about 10,300 apartments in upstate New York and Washington in the next two weeks.

ApartmentGuide.com, an Atlanta-based apartment-search site, put 266 of the 21,000 apartment communities on its national listing service on the system earlier this month and plans to add 1,000 communities during the next 60 days. Another big online service, Apartments.com, a Chicago site with listings of 11,000 communities representing more than two million apartments, says it is testing the program.

United Dominion Realty Trust Inc., Richmond, Va., which owns 74,262 apartments in 18 states, also has implemented the system for its entire portfolio.

Some conventional apartment brokers say they don't feel threatened mainly because they think the idea will backfire on owners. "Why would somebody take a property out of their inventory for $9 when a person can easily change their mind?" asks Leona Beldini, a broker with Charles B. Swensen Inc. in Jersey City, N.J. "It doesn't make sense. A person changes their mind, and the property goes into inventory all over again," adding to the time the apartment remains on the market.

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