Finding a new apartment in Madison, especially a downtown Madison apartment, sucks. There’s really no other way to put it.
As if mid-August homelessness and the impossibility of getting security deposits back didn’t make the rental process bad enough, it’s also crazy frustrating to even find a downtown apartment to eventually lose your entire security deposit at in the first place.
The UW campus area housing site is a bear to use and rarely updated. Craigslist takes forever to sort through, doesn’t have much information, and is spammy. Those local apartment pamphlets you see on every street corner have websites but they’re impossible to use and also completely out-of-date. And there are so many landlords in Madison it makes it impossible to even know where to start.
Enter MoveinMadison.com, a new site launched in January by UW-alumni with the mission to: “Put every apartment in Madison at your fingertips.”
Their idea is to finally combine all of Madison’s apartments on one website that is up-to-date and stupid simple and easy to use. Essentially, a search engine built just for downtown Madison apartments.
From their about us page:
We founded MoveinMadison.com in January 2011 for a simple reason: apartment hunting in Madison just plain sucked.As UW students and then recent graduates with more than 10 Madison apartment hunts between us, we had far too much experience with the typical Madison apartment search. The endless shuffling through of craigslist ads. The local apartment listing sites that felt like they were built in the 90’s (and last updated then too). And the eventual resignation to just walking around and looking for ‘For Rent’ signs.We thought there had to be a better way to find a new place online.
The Sconz 