ZilpyThough you might have seen Zilpy’s BETA site sometime over the past month (they’ve been writing on an AR blog the past couple weeks), Zilpy “officially” launched today with a press release. According to their site, Zilpy is a free online rental market facts and analysis service dedicated to help you make better rental and investment decisions.

I just did a search for “Seattle, WA” and found their Seattle page — wow, there is a lot of useful data relating to the local rental market! Based on the short amount of time I devoted to exploring the site, I think my favorite part of the site is the Rent Snapshot module in the upper left of the page. It is a helpful data point to know the average rent, average square footage, and number of rentals broken down by size of the unit (studio, 1 bedroom, 2 bedrooms, etc), and also to see the price trend over the past year.

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I’m guessing this is just the beginning of what they are planning on building — for instance, there are currently no details of finding actual properties for rent is difficult at the moment. I think they have a long way to go to catch Hotpads in the rental market, but it seems they are off to a good start.