Private-label classified advertising technology provider Adicio upgraded its Rentals platform to include a significantly enhanced amenities search. The platform can also operate as both a standalone rentals-only site or integrated into Adicio’s main properties offering.

The upgrade puts Adicio’s rentals platform on a par with branded competitors such as Move.com’s rentals site (the former RentNet) and Apartments.com in terms of functionality. From a design perspective, to our taste, Move.com’s site comes out on top, but we found Adicio Rentals far superior to Apartments.com, which appears cluttered and in need of a makeover. With 100 different criteria, Adicio also seems to offer a larger amenities selection, which can be searched by unit, apartment complex or mix-and-match.

We liked Adicio’s tabbed approach to rental listings – it’s neat and, once the page loads, a breeze to switch between views (especially compared with Move.com’s single long scrolling page). Adicio also has the most extensive neighborhood information of the three, powered by Onboard Analytics (which also provides data to Move.com).

Apartments.com doesn’t include a neighborhood feature at all on its main site, but its niche ApartmentHomeLiving.com includes more than 1,700 well-developed browse-able city and apartment guides.
Adicio Rentals sports the usual listing features: photos, maps, floor plans and virtual or video tours, as does Move and Apartments.com.

We also looked at Rent.com but quickly steered clear. The site requires not only a starting rental date, but an e-mail address and password just to look at listings. The company then immediately began spamming us with messages with only an opt-out option. (Earth to Rent.com – opt-out is so 1999).

The ability for newspapers to create their own rentals-only Web sites with unique URLs is a nice touch for the new Adicio service. The Buffalo News, for example, brands its home search as HomeFinderExtra and its rentals site as ApartmentFinderExtra. They’re linked separately from the main Buffalo.com portal rather than being grouped together under a single “real estate” category.

Adicio calls its new offering “hyper-local” although we didn’t see any micro-sites dedicated to just a specific city or community. It’s early yet. Still, the separation between rentals and for sale homes gives both the News and its advertisers more flexibility — ad rates for apartment-specific sites are generally lower.

We caught up with Devri Lynch, Adicio’s media account executive for real estate, who gave us a walk-through of the new platform. She pointed us to some of the upsell opportunities newspapers can give their advertisers. There are both spotlight ads listed on top and ads mixed into the listings with a yellow background.

The number of photos allowed is pretty standard — up to 16 per unit. Property managers can hide street addresses – in that case the map view will point to the center of the city. Virtual tours can be created by third-party vendors such as DMC and AdFare (this is another upsell opportunity for Adicio clients, Lynch said).

Liner ads from a newspaper’s print edition can be posted online; Adicio’s system will then push out an e-mail to the advertiser suggesting it enhance the listing with more text and photos — for an upsell fee, of course.
Apartment complexes can include descriptions of the community as a whole, detailing all the amenities such as waterfront, gym or computer center, plus the individual units within the community at different price points.

The Rentals platform is still quite new and most of Adicio’s sites are either unannounced as of yet or, in the case of Buffalo, still populating their sites with listings. So it’s hard for us to gauge effectiveness or present any relevant metrics yet. The next newspaper to launch will be the Seattle Times, Lynch told us.

Last year, Adicio launched a national portal for jobs under its CareerCast brand. Is the same in store for real estate? Lynch wouldn’t say, although she suggested that jobs are perhaps more appropriate for the national approach (people look for employment first before thinking about where to live).

Just the same, it’s an option. In today’s economy, with more and more people out of work, moving first and looking for a job second may become increasingly popular.