Students to Launch Apartment-Search Internet Site
Contact: George Manlove, 581-3756
ORONO — Finding an apartment in a college community where 7,000 students live off campus usually promises to be a labor-intensive and time-consuming process, but a group of Information Systems Engineering seniors at UMaine have applied their computing skills to simplify things.
For their senior Capstone project, seven students have created an interactive “UMaineRents” website for students and area landlords. Landlords are invited to list their properties, along with descriptions, amenities, terms of rental agreement, location, price and answers to commonly asked questions. Students, identified through their FirstClass email addresses, can search the database for suitable apartments before even picking up the telephone. The service is free and will be managed under the auspices of the Office of the Dean of Students.
The students began introducing area landlords to the concept last week and are meeting today at 3 p.m. in Room 315 of the Memorial Union with Angel Loredo, associate dean of students, and Orono municipal officials to explain the service. Jay Kinzer, a co-creator of the site (http://www.umaine.edu/UMaineRents/), hopes it will contain enough listings to open to the public on May 4.
Kinzer says finding suitable off-campus student housing often is a labor-intensive process for both students and landlords. The majority of UMaine’s more than 11,000 students live off campus. That means thousands of telephone calls to landlords. The UMaineRents website can streamline that process substantially, Kinzer says.
“This program will take some of the stress out of finding apartments, especially for those students who are coming from out of state,” Loredo says.
Creating UMaineRents calls into play skills the students learned as part of their academic discipline, and then some, according to Kinzer, who also works as a student employee in the Department of University Relations, where he helps to design or modify university-related websites.
Creating the rental property portal employed a variety of complex computer code writing and database creation, plus an assemblage of advanced computer skills.
For instance, UMaineRents includes special mapping technology linked to a Google mapping program, so browsers can quickly see where apartments are located.
“This is definitely relevant to the database side of the discipline,” Kinzer says.
Professor Harlan Onsrud, who oversees the project, speaks highly of the student initiative and the application of their academic skills to immediate needs of the surrounding communities.
“High level information technology skills are in high demand both in Maine and around the nation,” Onsrud says. “Team projects like this force students to pull all their past course work together as well as learn on-the-fly as they are confronted with myriad practical problems in designing and implementing a realistic and useful system.
“It truly caps off their education and skills. If they have done their job well, all the technological sophistication should be hidden to the typical user and it should be simple and obvious to use,” Onsrud says. “Whether you are a landlord, a student looking for an apartment, or the information system administrator, judge for yourself whether they have achieved this objective.”
Students who designed and created UMaineRents, in addition to Kinzer, are Kevin Ballew, Travis Buuck, Chris Currier, Jon Dearborn, Gabriel Irvine-McDermott and Ben Sweeney.
Landlords or tenant leaseholders interested in listing property to rent or sublet can go to the site at http://www.umaine.edu/UMaineRents/ to start entering information, or send inquiries to UmaineRents@gmail.com.