Web site enables students to bid on Bloomington housing via Internet auctions

Students at IU now have a new way to get their hands on the most sought-after properties in Bloomington -- by bidding on them.\nAn online housing auction Web site, www.campus1Housing.com, opened to the IU-Bloomington campus Oct. 10. The site makes it possible for potential renters to browse off-campus properties from management companies in Bloomington, including Parker Real Estate Management, Vencel Properties and Elkins Apartments. They can then bid against other students to lease the property.\nTo bid, students must register their names and the names of their intended roommates with the site. Then the auction opens and the bidding begins. The potential leasers can browse photos, see maps and review rental policies. When the bidding closes, the winning bidder then meets with the housing manager to sign the lease. \nThis site is the first of its kind, and the innovation is what makes it so appealing, said Kallie Bonnell, president of the Public Relations Student Society of America at IU and the marketing director for the IU branch of campus1housing.com. \nThe Web site's founders, Jake Burns and Joe Condit, graduates of the Miami University (Ohio), started the site as a way to make it easier for students to access property. \n"IU is set up much like Miami but about three times bigger," said Condit, the vice president and director of sales. "We thought that it would work as well at Indiana as it has at Miami." \nSo far, it has worked, he said. With only two weeks of operation under its belt, the site is getting nearly 3,000 hits a day, Burns said. \n"It's a snowball effect," he said. "As more people talk about it, hopefully it will grow. We are really excited to see what will happen within the next month." \nStacey Weeks, the tenant relations manager at Parker Realty Management Inc., is excited to see what will come of the site. \n"Our first set of auctions close next week, so that's when we will really get the feedback from the students and see how well the site will work," Weeks said.\nAfter the auctions close, Weeks will meet with the winners of the bids to sign leases. When Condit and Burns approached her this summer with the idea for the site, she saw it as a new way to interact with the potential renters. \n"With this site, it doesn't have to be first come, first served. They can say, 'This is what the property is worth to me' by naming their own price," she said. \nCampus1Housing.com has been launched at other Midwestern universities, including Notre Dame, Xavier and Miami (Ohio), as a way to make properties available to more students. It is the feedback from these already-established sections of the site that has inspired the changes to it.\nBonnell said in order to make properties more accessible to many people, campus1housing.com is designed to discourage those properties from being passed down through owners.\nCondit said it is a common misconception that the auction platform gives an advantage to people who come from more affluent backgrounds. "The only way to make it completely fair is an auction platform," he said. "If there was a better way, you bet we would use it. This puts everyone on the same playing field"