apartments.com review + a $25 visa gift card giveaway!

This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of apartments.com for SocialSpark. All opinions are 100% mine.

once we moved out of our house and got settled here at the rental, i jumped feet first into all things bay area research - schools, neighborhoods, talking to friends, even talking to friends of friends, and of course, looking into where in the world are we going to live...we need a house! talking with schools and friends has been the easy part - finding a home to purchase is proving to be the bigger challenge.

what i forgot about the bay area (i'm from there) is the hot housing market. in certain areas the market is highly competetive...and of course, my husband's new job is located right in the heart of it. as in homes getting up to 80 offers (or more) heart of it.

i know! cah-ray-zeeeee! our real estate agent's office has a contest each week to see which house gets the most offers. fun times.

after having a long conversation with our bay area agent, he strongly suggested finding our school first...and then renting a home in that general area. apparently, we are going to have to be *there* to jump on a house right away. like - as soon as it comes on the market. doing that would be very difficult from 2,500 miles away.

lucky me, now i can add to my list the search for a rental house. of course, i'm going to continue looking at the 50 or more mls listings in my inbox each day and remain hopeful we can find an awesome house without having to rent again. but it would be smart of me to have a rental home in my back pocket as we get closer to the move this summer.

trust me when i say, never in a million years did i think this move would include selling our house (in less than 5 weeks), moving to a rental house, then moving across the country to another rental house, and dealing with an insane bay area housing market. the idea of moving time and time again isn't an exciting thought. but we have to do what we have to do, right? better to be totally prepared for the worst case scenario.

so, when apartments.com reached out to me to review their site, it couldn't have come at a better time! yes, apartments.com....heeeeelp me!!! you've never seen someone move so fast to get to the computer and check out the site. like, faster than my 3 nieces did when one direction concert tickets went on sale. yes, that fast, but without all the screaming and squeeling.

ok maybe i did scream a little bit.

:-)

right away i felt lighter because the site is easy to navigate and has a cheery color palate...

i started by adding a city in the search field...

and everything available for rent in that area showed up in a highly organized list....even highlighting best matches for me...

once i had the main result list, i further customized my search by playing around with the toolbar along the top...

love it!

funny enough i found the perfect rental on my first search...just $12,000 per month. :-)....

what a deal, right? talk about getting me back to my roots - i was born in the presidio so this is puuuurrfect! and look at the view from my backyard...

yes. i am kidding. we can certainly NOT afford $12,000 per month...but you can see how apartments.com breaks down the price for you based on how many bedrooms, etc...

it was really fun and easy to play around in the search toolbar to completely customize our rental search. and it's not just apartments - there are homes on the site as well! personally, because i'm a big detail person, i liked reading through the very detailed rental descriptions. there's tons of info along with great photos. that's a big deal for me because i'm far away - the more detail i know up front, the better.

another perk to the apartments.com website is that they have a mobile app (iPhone, iPad, and android). so when i'm there in a few weekends looking around, i can easily look up rental homes via their mobile app. nice!

if you are looking for a rental apartment or home, be sure to check out the site...apartments.com

if you enjoy following your favorite companies via social media outlets, apartments.com is on twitter - @aptscom.

because apartments.com is confident in their site and know how much you will enjoy searching on it, they are offering one of my readers a $25 visa gift card just for looking around! yay! and we're keeping the entry process super easy.

to enter...

mandatory: leave a comment on this blog post telling me which apartment/home from apartments.com you would choose if you were moving. just include the link from the apartments.com page right here along with your comment.

non-mandatory additional entry: tweet @aptscom telling us which apartments you love. be sure to include #AptsWin in your tweet. and be sure to let me know here that you tweeted about it. i'm not a twitter person so i won't see you over there. :-)

that's it!

this giveaway will be accepting entries now through wednesday, march 6 (2 weeks). a winner will be chosen at random, contacted via e-mail and the $25 visa gift card will be mailed directly to you from the sponsor.

good luck!