Apartments.com Acquires Social Media Web Site Apartment Home Living

By Anuradha Kher, Online News EditorChicago–Apartments.com has recently acquired social media apartment Web site, Apartment Home Living, in order to deepen its footprint in the online apartment rental search category and extend its reach to a broader audience of renters. With the acquisition, advertisements and listings on Apartments.com will automatically appear on the Apartment Home Living web site. The Apartment Home Living web site will not have any exclusive ads.“The main reason for this acquisition is that we wanted to provide our advertisers with a broader reach and different environment to showcase their properties,” Kevin Doyle, senior vice president and general manager of Apartments.com, tells MHN. “We are now able to offer an even more desirable solution to advertisers. We hope to drive even more qualified renter leads to our listings through renter exposure on more than 1,000 partner Web sites.”  Apartment Home Living gets 525,000 monthly Web site visitors and Apartment.com has five million visitors a month. Doyle notes that this acquisition has nothing to with the economic downturn that may have resulted in reduced advertising. “So far, we haven’t seen any reduction in our advertising. Obviously, this year we expect a lot of companies to evaluate their marketing budgets. But we are very well-positioned and believe that companies will realize that our sites are a good way to pull in renters, something owners/managers will have to keep doing.”Larry Cotter, vice president and general manager of Apartment Home Living, says, “Every renter is different. To attract a broader audience, it’s important to be able to speak to a variety of personalities and reach new audiences by leveraging the booming trend of social media.”Apartments.com and Apartment Home Living will continue to operate as two separate Web sites. In addition, Apartment Home Living offers apartment communities “MyMedia”–a product that helps apartment managers increase their closing and retention rates by facilitating the communication between the leasing office, rental prospect and current residents. “MyMedia” generates professionally produced and personalized emails, forms, flyers, videos and more. A version of “MyMedia” will be available to Apartments.com customers this spring. Both Apartments.com and Apartment Home Living will maintain separate business units. Apartments.com is headquartered in Chicago, and Apartment Home Living is in Austin, Texas.