Rentometer Paves The Way For Smart Moves

[This post is written and copyrighted by FIRE Finance (http://firefinance.blogspot.com).]

Dec 1, 2008: One of the basic necessities for humans is shelter. It is often true that we pay around 15 to 35 percent of our take-home salaries in rent or mortgages. For those of us who are renting apartments, the rent-money is sheer waste since we are not building any home equity. So our aim should be to shell out as less rent dollars as possible. But how do we find out whether we have got a good deal or not ? Once we do the research and move into an apartment, we seldom check how the rent in the neighborhood is faring. Very often we find it intimidating or are lazy to go through all the rental websites or the listings in the apartment guides to check our neighborhood rents. The task is quite time consuming too. Well not any more!

A new tool named RentOMeter by iiProperty has come to our aid which will give us the rental figures in a couple of minutes. We checked out this tool and according to it we have got a reasonably good deal since we are paying around $50 less than the median rent of our neighborhood. That is news to us and reason enough to call for a celebration!

To use the tool, we need to input our current address and rent. Next, a rentometer appears that shows, with different colored needles, how much rent we are paying, alongwith the median, low, and high rents of the neighborhood. On the right hand side of the rentometer a Google Map will appear with the blobs for the different properties in the neighborhood. When we click the blobs we get to see the rent for our specific type of apartment (for e.g. 2 bedrooms) at that property and its distance from our current address. That is really cool ! No driving around, no research at various websites, no pouring through rental guides, just a click and we know what the rent map looks like.

We urge our audience to take a look at RentOMeter and play with the tool. Let us know what new things you find out from your experiences. Also, check out their top 10 costliest cities to rent properties from.