Rentenna, Launching Today, May Take the Hate Out of Apartment Hunting

Boston apartment photo via Shutterstock

If you’ve lived through the unique torture of trying to find an apartment in Boston, or if you’re experiencing dry heaves at the thought of relocating sometime soon, a new website that’s launching today may alleviate some of the stress.

Rentenna, which has been operating in New York for the past year, uses an algorithm to pull information about apartment buildings from around the web, which “includes renter ratings, neighborhood, value, landlord complaints, amenities and more,” says Rentenna cofounder Alicia Schwartz. They crunch the numbers to calculate a score, and the result is a clean, Pinterest-looking site that provides photos and comments about available listings at apartment buildings throughout the city:

You can pin promising units, share boards with your roommates, and get a sense of what’s nearby from local Yelp listings, which are pulled into the site. You can also search for some more obscure amenities like onsite gardens, children’s playrooms, or barbecue pits. It also gives you a nice look at what rental units cost in the surrounding area, which, given Boston’s high rents, is a bit of added insight. At launch, the site has 10,000 buildings rated in Boston, which is pretty impressive, and their top listing is at 520 Beacon Street, which got a score of 92.

Rentenna also compiled a celebrity map for New York City, and launched a mobile app so that you can find out where local stars live nearby, so here’s hoping they make both for Boston sometime soon.