The night before my top-choice medical school interview, Dan’s pipes started leaking.  It was a hot, dirty water that ran in brown rivulets down his exposed pipes onto his cluttered desk.  This probably wasn’t the first time the pipes had leaked in the history of this apartment, the pipes were stained with a sticky substance that i chose to ignore when he was moving in.  I wanted to be supportive, but the apartment needed touch-ups in many places, and I felt he and his roommates had chosen an apartment instead of researching the management company and the building.  Almost a year into our relationship, it was one of the first disagreements we had, and it was focused on something that Dan really couldn’t help: where was he supposed to go to do this research?  How could he change the power balance of realtors pressuring him and his roommates to sign a lease quickly and without thought?  And so, I like to think, the idea for rentmaps.com was born.  Other websites had many features that centralized the apartment search, but none had a library or a history of the apartment, the building or the area.  Instead, the information remained private, concealed by the landlord and realtors to the detriment of the renter.

Fast forward several months; Dan and I have decided to move in together.  We have scoped out the perfect neighborhood, but we can’t seem to get our foot in the door and rentals in the neighborhood seem to fly off the market.  Stressed, we expand our search across the Charles, finding apartments that are a bit out of our price range and which feel like a compromise.  Out of the blue, a realtor emails us with the first view of an apartment in our original neighborhood; there were no photos, no stats, and no information.  The apartment turned out to be our dream come true–everything we could possibly ask for.  The management company is prompt, attentive and efficient.  This autumn, they sent a team of workers to clear leaves from our private backyard, and this winter, they plowed our driveway right after a heavy snow.  We fell into this apartment by pure chance, but now we never want to move.  Rentmaps.com takes some of the luck and serendipity out of the apartment search, allowing renters to find their perfect apartment.