Nestio – Apartment Hunting in a Digital Age

Ask anyone who’s had to look for a new apartment in the last few years, and you’ll find out that tracking down and securing the perfect pad is no easy feat. Nestio is an application that harnesses technology to help simplify an age-old task. People who use Nestio can save their favorite real estate listings, share their favorite places with potential roommates, and receive instant notifications when the listings they’ve saved have been updated or changed.

Using Nestio doesn’t mean you have to change the way you look for apartments online. You can continue to use the sites and services you like best – like Craigslist, Apartments.com, and others – to find places that fit your specifications. When you find a place that looks good, save it to your Nestio account. Keep saving listings until you’ve got a handful to choose from, and then send all those listings to your soon-to-be roomies through Facebook with the click of a button. You and your roommates can add notes and photos to the listings you’ve saved on Nestio, and the application will automatically notify you if the information on a listing has been updated to reflect a lower price or a new move-in date. When you come to a consensus with your roommates about which apartment seems best, you can contact the agent or landlord who posted the listing directly through the Nestio site. Nestio also makes it easy to keep track of which agents you’ve contacted and which viewings you’ve scheduled on one organized page.

Among the many useful features available through Nestio is the application’s mapping tool, which lets you plot all the pads you’re looking at on a single map. You can also use the application to quickly calculate commuting times between the apartments you’re looking at and your office or school. iPhone users who download the mobile application will be able to access many of these features from their phones, which means they can add notes and photos to any listing they’ve saved while they’re in the middle of viewing potential pads.

Practical Uses:

• Find an apartment that’s located near your work
• Be the first to know when an apartment’s rental price has gone down
• Share potential apartment options with your future roommates
• Jot down notes about an apartment while you’re looking at it in person

Insider Tips:

• iPhone users can download the mobile app
• Download the bookmarklet tool to quickly save listings to Nestio
• Users with Facebook accounts can start using Nestio with a single click
• Users can invite their friends on Facebook to view certain listings by just typing in the first few letters of their names

What we liked:

• Nestio is a great way for roommates to share information about the listings they find
• The note-taking feature is available on the mobile application
• Listings can be viewed, sorted, and rated in a number of ways
• The Local News feature shows people relevant news stories that are happening near the apartments they’re looking at

What we didn’t like:

• Nothing

Alternatives:

• Buyfolio – http://buyfolio.com
• Lovely – http://livelovely.com

Company Info:

• Launched: October 2011 (Nationwide)
• Privately Held
• Headquarters: New York, New York
• Founded by: Mike O’Toole, Caren Maio, and Matt Raoul
• Web site: http://nestio.com/

Costs:

• Free