Portfolio
Chicago Rentals Direct: Chicago Rentals Direct
The Challenge
Chicago Rentals Direct provides Chicago apartment renters with easy, searchable access to hundreds of apartments for rent directly by owner, without having to go through a broker and pay an expensive fee.
Since their online business depends entirely on giving users reliable and searchable data, the database architecture and programming for their website is key to their business model; they needed a stable online database with a web application interface to their data.
Our Solution
Parallactic designed a MySQL database that could hold all of CRD’s rental listings and expand with their business, and coded the Ruby on Rails back-end that searches the data and displays it to users.
We programmed searching and sorting functions that enable users to find their dream apartment by location (they can set search boundaries by clicking directly on a map), availability date, price range, number of bedrooms, amenities (users can select from a list of checkboxes), and more criteria. Users can also save their searches and get email updates when new listings that match their criteria are added — making it even easier to find their dream apartment.
Results
Chicago Rentals Direct now hosts hundreds of apartment listings in its online database and has thousands of renters signed up to search apartments and receive updates. We’ve continued to work with CRD after the site’s launch to make incremental improvements and changes as they tweak their business model and respond to user input.