Brown Student Agencies has partnered with Tufts University student startup JumpOffCampus to provide a website where users can search for and post subletting opportunities for places to rent near the University. Though the Brown portion of the website has only been online since April 2, there are already 70 subletting listings and many people looking for opportunities to rent on the site as the summer approaches.
"We wanted to provide this service to help bring all the subletting options together in one place for students," said Lingke Wang '12, executive director emeritus at BSA. "JumpOffCampus really opens up the (subletting) market."
BSA had received numerous complaints from students about difficulties finding subletters, according to Wang. In response, BSA partnered with JumpOffCampus, an off-campus housing site. BSA chose the site over other options partly because of their student foundation and specific goal of serving students and university administration, Wang said. Before this option, students often relied on less centralized advertising options like Facebook and Craigslist.
"I started using the website a week ago. So far we've gotten about 10-15 people email us saying they are interested in subletting," wrote Marley Pierce '13 in an email to The Herald. "(JumpOffCampus) has been so useful and successful for us that we haven't had to use other media outlets."
JumpOffCampus was founded by Tuft graduates, Mark Abramowicz and Kyle Nichols-Schmolze, who are now the chief executive officer and chief technology officer for the service respectively. The two founders teamed up in their junior year and are participating in several startup incubators including Betaspring and Masschallenge, according to Abramowicz. In the past few months, JumpOffCampus has rapidly expanded from serving two to 10 colleges in Rhode Island, Massachusetts and New York, Abramowicz said. Their goal is to be partnered with 90 schools by the end of the year.
JumpOffCampus differs from other services that bring together subletters like Craigslist and Facebook. Helpful features include an intuitive Google Maps interface to plot listing locations, sorting parameters that allow ordering by price, number of rooms and date of availability. The site also gives users the ability to save listings and hide undesirable ones. Craigslist postings and Facebook events lack similar convenient features.
"(JumpOffCampus) has a way better user interface than Craigslist as it's customized specifically to housing and you can really search for and provide more details in a standardized way," wrote Frieda Kay '12 in an email to The Herald. Additionally, the website has an edge over its competitors because it is specifically tailored for students and university administration by students. Because only students with a .edu email address may register to respond to subletting ads and the website is sponsored by the BSA, finding trustworthy subletters is much easier than with similar services, Abramowicz said.
While the startup is currently only providing its subletting service to the Brown community, Abramowicz said JumpOffCampus offers additional off-campus housing services to other universities including actual apartment listings for people looking to lease, a roommate finder and a used-item marketplace.
