Nestio Is Like A Tripit For Apartment Searches

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view. When you’re looking for a new apartment, or a new place to live, there are quite a few sites you can turn to for real estate listings. There’s Craigslist if you’re feeling saucy, Redfin, Zillow, Realtor.com, and Trulia, to name a few. As my colleague Erick Schonfeld pointed out last year, there’s room for competition in this market, and there’s potential for profitability. But not for a clone.

Real estate listings sites can be overwhelming and difficult to navigate. It’s also hard to keep track of the places you’ve looked at without creating an external document or leaving sticky notes all over your computer screen, which is why Nestio is trying to be something akin to the Tripit for the apartment search, rather than just another real estate listings app. Launching today in the app store, Nestio is a service meant to supplement listings sites by adding some much needed organization to your apartment search.

Thus, Nestio is an organizational tool for consumers to save listings from various listing service providers all in one place. Users send Nestio their listings, the startup adds a sleek interface, and then allow users to collect, collaborate, and find out additional information on any particular listing.

And like any good young startup in 2011, Nestio is hoping to deliver a killer mobile experience that goes beyond your average port from website to mobile. Obviously, when one deep in the apartment or home search, an intuitive interface with a full suite of tools really comes in handy, though I’m not sure how much of the initial apartment search happens on mobile devices. I always start at my laptop, but of course, once you find places you’re interested in, you get out there to see them live.

Thus, in a way Nestio, which is one of the eleven recent graduates of TechStars NYC class, is like your apartment search field journal. It adds functionality to the search process by allowing you to save listings from a host of supported sites, view and edit your saved listings, and add new listings you see for the first time on the go. You can also map out the location of the listings you save, and add notes and photos you snap on site to the listings. And all of this syncs up with your Nestio web activity.

Having a personalized dashboard of saved listings, with notes and photos, is a great feature, and I can really see that coming in hand during the search for a new place to live. Before launching Nestio, the Nestio team spent time doing its due diligence and found that consumers were accessing numerous sites in an attempt to find a new place to live. The biggest missing piece was that consumers struggled to make sense of all the listings, and they wanted a place to manage them all, instead of having to create spreadsheets and bookmarks, etc.

The mobile piece is huge for Nestio, and as the startup provides a supplement to the value of listing services like Zillow and Trulia, there’s something to be said for organizing and calming the frantic process that is the apartment search. The startup will also soon be adding the ability to share your apartment listings, notes, and favorite places and collaborate on the apartment search with your friends and roommates, which will add a social and collaborative layer to real estate searches that’s desperately needed.

Check it out.