Rent app eases budgeting stress

Photo by: Henoc Kivuye

 

As students graduate and move away from home, they are left questioning where they will live and with whom. Some people take a single-room apartment, but others choose a larger apartment and roommates.

“I will probably be trying to share an apartment with people,” senior Timothy Sikes said. “I would assume it would probably be cheaper to rent an apartment and share it with some other people.”

When searching for an apartment rooting out the best deals on rooms is paramount, especially for students who don’t have a steady income.

“Being a student is expensive, and I think we’re all looking for good ways to save,” Brown University graduate Zoe Chaves said.

A thorough search of nearby apartments could prove helpful if a student has the dedication to compare the prices for studios as opposed to shared rooming in a larger apartment. Another option would be to use an online web tool for averaging rents.

“That’d be beneficial in helping make a decision as to…where to stay or how much I should be expecting to pay,” Sikes said.

Such a tool can be found on the Splitwise website, a site dedicated to helping people handle their money at no cost to the user. It can be used to figure how roommates should split their rent fees fairly rather than leaving them to reach a compromise on their own.

“Splitwise is a website and mobile app that helps roommates and friends keep track of shared expenses and IOUs,” Chaves said.

Chaves is an employee of Splitwise – a relatively youthful, small enterprise.

“It was developed in 2011 by our co-founders Jon, Ryan and Marshall,” Chaves said. “There are now two employees too, myself included.”

They recently began reaching out to colleges by making visual charts for them containing the information available through the tool.

“We started making the specific analyses for different colleges because we were finding that while the general tool is useful, people really love visualizing data and that’s how they best connect with it,” Chaves said. “So we thought about who might need this type of info the most –young people living on a budget – and we started reaching out to colleges to do these custom visuals.”

The rent average tool on this site uses information provided by Rent Metrics to calculate the costs per individual based on the area.

“We made [this tool] because we got a really great data set from our friends over at RentMetrics, with over two million apartment prices from across the country matched to number of bedrooms and zip code,” Chaves said. “We just wanted to do something cool with the data that would help people.”

The app arranges data based on zip codes. All a needs to do is insert the zip code for the area they are considering moving to and the tool will bring up charts with the related information.

“The way it works is you plug in a zip code and then it tells you the average rent per bedroom in that area, by apartment size – studio, one-bed, etc.,” Chaves said. “It calculates how much money you could expect to save by taking on a roommate or two versus living alone, and shows how many of each type of apartment are available in your zip code.”

This tool can save a lot of time for students.

“I know some people… they don’t do a whole lot of research before they get an apartment, and you know that can really hurt them,” Sikes said. “A small tool like this I’m sure would be very helpful.”

The Splitwise app could help graduating seniors manage their budgets.

“It seemed like a really cool tool and something that would be really helpful,” senior Kristen Lindsey said. “Especially because I even looked up places I was looking to live, and so that was really helpful because it also gives me the whole – how much should I be aiming for, and how much if I lived in this part of Dallas, how much would I be looking at, and if I lived in this part of Dallas would it be worth living farther from work and paying less.”

But beyond simply managing finances between roommates, Chaves highlighted the program’s central mission of finding affordable housing for those who might otherwise not know the possibility of living in an area even existed.

“We decided to build this tool that helps people find affordable neighborhoods and figure out how many roommates to get to live cheaply,” Chaves said.

If they are trying to get a particular apartment, it provides students with a rough estimate as to what price they could be negotiating for.

“I would first try to negotiate the price [for a more expensive apartment] because I really like it and it’s in a good spot and that is important to me,” Lindsey said. “However, because once again I’m starting out with a negative balance, paying student loans, if they would not negotiate with me, I would definitely go for something much cheaper.”

This web tool can be found at http://average-rent.splitwise.com/