Facing Housing Problems, Students Turn to Online Brokers

New York University has long attracted students with its excellent location in the center Greenwich Village.  However, as numerous disappointed freshmen will attest, more and more of their housing and even classrooms are located in different areas of the city.  The university recently even started housing students on the other side of the river in Brooklyn.  Add to this NYU's student housing in Chinatown, and the picture of the urbane school in Bob Dylan's old stomping grounds becomes more and more removed from the reality of a dispersed, city-wide campus.

As NYU expands its student housing into Brooklyn and other areas of New York City, and other major New York City universities like Columbia continue to expand, more and more students are yearning to live off campus. 

Though university dormitories and apartments are often subsidized, offering students significant discounts on relatively central living spaces, universities often expect college students to live in dorms and apartments that can only be described as meeting a sub-adult standard of housing.  College students, naturally, take this treatment only grudgingly.

Often, student apartments do not include a kitchen or even kitchenette, leaving students at the mercy of repetitive dining hall food from cafeterias that are only open limited hours each day.  Furthermore, most student housing is only available nine of the twelve months of the year, making the arduous task of moving a biannual event, even for the occasional unlucky hyper-busy graduate student.

College students are, by far, the most likely demographic to use the internet to find housing and other important life items by utilizing the internet.  So, it should come as no surprise that their exodus off campus has been one of the major sources of growth in the customer base of real estate and apartment rental web sites. 

Craigslist is the most popular site for students to get apartment listings, but a number of websites that offer fuller services and more extensive background information are also becoming popular among students looking to rent an apartment in New York City, the largest rental market in the country.  

CityCribs.com is perhaps the best example of the new wave in New York City apartment rental websites.  A service that started in New York City but has expanded nationally, it combines advanced searches of large databases with detailed information and photos of each property. Students can view tens of apartments in great detail in the time it would take them to physically visit one apartment.

Whatever the website, though, it is clear that the internet and the students at its cutting edge are dramatically changing the New York City apartment market.

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