hubbuzz blog

The National Association of Home Builders does a renter survey every now and then, looking for the trends that turn a renter into a home-owner. One of their questions is about the reasons that renters chose their current apartment home.

In the survey completed in 2002, renters pointed to rent level, then location, neighborhood/community, apartment availability and then apartment design and/or size.

In the 1992 NAHB renter survey, the most commonly listed reasons for choosing the present apartment were rent level, followed by location, neighborhood/community, apartment design/size, and apartment availability – which is just a change in the order of the last two factors. In other words, rent and location mattered most back then, too.

Rent level is a fixed issue for most renters – otherwise there wouldn’t be formulas about how to calculate what your maximum rent should be. Location and neighborhood or community also seem like given, but maybe that’s because it matches our hubbuzz.com worldview. So we went back into our website gestation period to find out why we thought  location and neighborhood were so important – how did we get headed down this path? 

First little epiphany: The mantra of real estate is “Location, location, location” – everybody knows that phrase, and realtors and real estate professionals use it to explain the differences in desirability of a property or home. So, we thought, why doesn’t that apply to apartment search too? Why wouldn’t renters be interested in where a property sat, whether it’s inside an up-and-coming neighborhood or next to the ocean?

Second little epiphany: “Local search” was a phrase that was growing in importance every day. We were constantly coming across articles that talked about the pertinence of finding a retailer, service provider, cultural facility, etc., and being able to map it and figure out where it was in relation to other things. Bye-bye Yellow Pages, hello world.

Third little epiphany: Because Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist.com, said neighborhoods matter, there must be something to it. If he says so, that’s good enough for us!

So we have 14 markets built around tons of information in 526 neighborhoods. That’s today. Tomorrow there will be more. And more people will find our neighborhood information to be very helpful in finding their new apartment home. In the meantime, want to see a cool neighborhood in Denver? In Atlanta? In San Diego? We’ve got tons of them.

When hubbuzz.com was in its gestation period, pre-name, coming up with a name was quite a task – the difficulty of which we hadn’t expected. Apartments, neighborhoods, rent, spaces, places, digs, pad, home – these words, while all useful, are all very used. So we wound up with the concept of coining our own term, and it has served us well so far (though it’s sometimes difficult to communicate over the phone.)

Check out the Hubbuzz.com About Us blog, other hubbuzz.com local blogs and more at the Directory of Internet Blogs at BlogFlux.com.

Denver, CO — May 18, 2008 — It’s always a victory to celebrate an anniversary in the startup world. It’s even better when almost the entire founding team is intact (and there’s an eponymous cocktail in the party mix.)

The hubbuzz.com one year anniversary on May 18, 2008, represented a great opportunity to celebrate the progress of a year’s worth of hard work on a website that is recognized as “the next big thing” in online apartment search. In 2007, hubbuzz.com was launched in Denver with 38 properties. Today, the site is live in 12 markets with more than 1500 properties listed and more being added every day. More...