If you’re a regular visitor to, or long-time customer of Apartments.com, you may have noticed the significant transformation of our site that has taken place in the last week or so. After years of research, hard work and testing, we launched a redesigned version of our home page and search path! Needless to say, I’m very proud of the resulting effort.
What’s important to note is that this is not only a front-end re-skinning of our site, but a complete re-build of our underlying architecture. The goal, therefore, was not just to improve the user experience, but create a robust foundation for future growth and innovation. Mission accomplished! That said, the freshest new features are the ones you see on the front-end, the ones that help prospective renters find a place to live, and I’ll enumerate a few of them now:
1. Faster path to search results
By bringing a city/state/zip search to the forefront, consumers can get to highly relevant search results with just one click. For those who prefer starting on a map, our new map search features an intuitive link path that helps consumers narrow down their desired geography and get to relevant search results in fewer clicks than ever before!
2. More ways to refine a search
Our new search results navigation bar allows renters to narrow down listings by rent range, bath and bed count, amenity and neighborhood. Renters who refine are more likely to send a lead, so we’re helping make that as easy as possible in order to showcase your listings to the most qualified renters.
3. Best Match and Close Match
While your property may not be exactly in the town being searched, precisely within a rent range, or have every single amenity specified, it might be close enough to stay within the renter’s consideration list. So we’ve introduced our Best Match/Close Match concept. Through data analytics and research, we’ve come up with a set of guidelines that, essentially, put buffers around those criteria, and present the Best Matches first, and then augment the search results with relevant Close Matches, thus ensuring your property is seen by more prospects.
There are lots of other exciting new changes to Apartments.com! But, most importantly, we now have this really solid, core technology to build on, and some great user experience elements to expand upon. What really excites me – for Apartments.com, our users and you, our customers – is where we can take it from here. We encourage your feedback in the comments or by email (redesignfeedback@apartments.com).
View our press release to learn more about our redesign.
