High-tech apartment hunting
Text messaging new tool in finding a place to live

BY LORE CROGHAN
DAILY NEWS BUSINESS WRITER

Blake de la Torre found an apartment on the upper East Side using the text messaging service. It's hard to find an apartment to rent in this town, but a pair of Bulgarian-born entrepreneurs are working to make it easier for you.

Their free service - TextoRent.com - lines up brokers who send text messages to your cell phone about apartments you might want.

Kalin Kassabov remembers all too well what it was like when he got here after graduating from the University of Central Oklahoma. By the time he'd call about a listing, the apartment would be taken.

"It won't be the only thing people do to find an apartment, but it's so easy," said Kassabov, 28. "Why not add it to the mix?" He and business partner Peter Kassov, 27, started the service in a slow, controlled way. In operation since the end of August, it has 100 apartment hunters as customers, and 20 brokers who send them listings.

The rentals are in Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens.

Apartment hunters fill out an online form detailing the size, price range and nabes they have in mind. Brokers look for prospects whose wants match the apartments they're offering - and pay $4 for each person they contact with a text message.

Things should start to pick up speed as Kassabov and Kassov rev up their marketing campaign, which is geared to reach their prime target audience, those 18 to 35 years old.

Their launch party at West Village bar Movida this Wednesday night - which is open to the public - should get them some attention. They've posted an eye-catching invitation on their MySpace.com page that promises "Free Booze."

The MySpace page isn't Kassabov and Kassov's, strictly speaking. It's a profile of a good-looking young woman identified as "Bili, the happy apartment hunter." Her photo's on the page, along with a link to TextoRent.com's Web site. She's a real person who works for them.

They've had a thousand stickers bearing the TextoRent.com name pasted up and down Broadway and West Broadway, south of 14th St. Once more apartment hunters sign up, the two intend to bring additional brokers into the game.

If all goes well, they'll expand to the Jersey City-Hoboken area, where so many young New Yorkers wind up renting. They might try a couple other big cities like Los Angeles and Chicago, too.

Based on their experience with other texting services they've created, the apartment listings business should break even in a year, Kassabov said.

The two men - who met when Kassov was an exchange student at the University of Central Oklahoma - have had a good run since they launched their company, VIE Corp., three and a half years ago.

Two of their creations are profitable. SendSMSnow.com - a free service that lets you type messages on a computer and send them to a cell phone - has 300,000 members. NightLifeTexting.com - for club promoters - is also doing well, they said.

Web entrepreneurs on the West Coast often start businesses in garages. But this is a New York story. They hatched VIE Corp. in their Astoria apartments. When they got tired of working in one apartment, they'd go to the other and work some more.

"Our business had two branches," Kassov recalled with a laugh.

At the beginning of this year, they graduated to an office suite near Ground Zero.

Starting early next year, another real estate service that delivers info to cell phones - Smarter Agent - will offer rental listings, too.

Smarter Agent's service will use GPS, or Global Positioning System technology, to look up the 10 apartment listings that are closest to wherever you are standing with your phone.

Eric Blumberg, Smarter Agent's president, said 2007 will be the "breakout year" for using cell phones to deliver data. "The more people that do consumer applications with cell phones, the better," he said.

Solid connection

For Blake de la Torre, it was better to have someone else do the apartment-hunting for her while she was at work - and alert her silently with a text message to her cell phone.

That way, she wasn't frequenting real estate Web sites on company time, or talking to brokers on her office phone.

Other people at the media agency where she works had gotten in trouble for doing personal business during the day.

"It's such a great idea," de la Torre, 23, said of the TextoRent.com service.

She got at least 10 apartment listings from it.

She was one of the first people to sign up for the texting service, when she needed help finding a Manhattan apartment for herself and two roommates.

She'd been living at home with her parents on Long Island since she graduated from college a year and a half ago. It was time to get a place of her own, she said.

Her parents had one stipulation, which she heeded - get a doorman.

"We want to know when you come home at 4 in the morning, there's someone to greet you," they told her.