troovy

Just over a year ago I had the the pleasure of needing to find an apartment within a matter of days. As if looking for new digs isn’t stressful enough, the stifling window of time I was restricted to made it doubly so. If I had been looking by or for myself alone, that search may have been a bit easier; instead, though, I was collaborating with my partner, AND trying to meet criteria specific to my 6yr. old son’s needs.

We did what millions of others do every month: hit up Craigslist and start browsing listings. Sometimes together, or separately, all the while emailing, IMing, calling about links we were finding.

As the search went along, lots of details were lost along the way. Sure we could bookmark listings we liked, but we never really seemed to; rather, both our browsers expanded with tab after tab of listings we could revisit. And, again, separately for the most part. Finally, when it came to reaching out the landlords and listing agents, communications were patchwork, with multiple email addresses used, forgotten CCs to each other, etc.

There had to be a better way.

troovy was born of that frustration, and aims to streamline and, hopefully, erase the struggles associated with our online apartment searches. How? Well, for starters:

• Save selected listings in a central place for ongoing review. By using our bookmarklet, you can grab listings from other listing sites and automatically save them to a saved and private search on troovy. Because Craigslist enjoys over 30 billion page views per month, we’ve highly optimized the bookmarklet to intelligently glean information from their listings. Use it and see!
• Collaborate on your search. Troovy relies on your facebook persona to create an account, mostly because we typically see apartment searching shared amongst friends and family members. When you start a new search using troovy, you can send private messages to your facebook network inviting them to help you on your search.
• Get smart, relevant information about your listings. When you save your listings to troovy, we’ll automatically map it and, with foursquare’s help, show you what’s currently popular nearby. We’re working on adding more contextual information of course, and would love to hear your thoughts on what could add more value too.
• Keep your communications in one place. Each listing saved from Craigslist enables you to send and receive email anonymously to the landlord/listing agent. And, like blog comments, this thread will appear on the listing page, so it’s all in one place. Cool, right?

This is our launch platform, but we’re looking to do much, much more to improve not only renters’ lives, but landlords and property managers’ too. Of course, the more we hear from our users — suggestions, questions, complaints, wtf’s, you name it — the better we can make troovy. Give us a try, and tell us what you think!