As of this week, there's a new source to help in the search for Macomb rentals: rentmacomb.com. The site only launched yesterday but already has quite a few properties posted.
Rentmacomb.com offers a way for visitors to browse available rentals according to price, number of bedrooms, or name of the landlord. Each listing includes a small Google map, showing exactly where the rental property is located in town.
What impresses me about the site (aside from its Google-esque clean and minimalistic interface) is its thoroughness, even this early on in its existence. (Today I counted over 60 properties on the site, easily twice the number you'll find in a local newspaper's classified ads on an average day.) The site's owners, Jacob and Marcia Thurman, invite all Macomb landlords to list their rental properties for free, either by (1) creating a user account and performing the data entry themselves or (2) filling out a form with the necessary information and snail-mailing it back to the Thurmans. Landlords have nothing to lose, so they participate, and that only helps the database grow more complete. (Because even a "free" endeavor like this has to make some revenue, the Thurmans run ads on the right side of each page on the site.)
In a letter to landlords this summer -- asking for their participation in the project -- the Thurmans explained that they were motivated to create rentmacomb.com after spending several months stuck on their own frustrating rental search. "We did eventually find a house that we like," they wrote, "but we also found that despite the very high number of rental properties in Macomb, information about what is available is hard to come by.
"In short, finding a place to rent in Macomb is a lot more difficult than it needs to be."
Earlier this spring, I wrote about the rentals list our RE/MAX office keeps on file -- an informal list of every currently available rental we know about. That list has never been all-inclusive, and I'm always looking for ways to make it better. As soon as I saw rentmacomb.com go live yesterday, I typed it in bold and added it to the top of our list. Maybe our office will have some luck steering landlords and tenants the Thurmans' way.
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