Bizdom’s Cribspot helps connect college students with housing

Tim Jones knows how much of a pain in the ass it is for college students to find off-campus housing. It’s why he and a group of three other undergrads at the University of Michigan started Cribspot, an Internet startup that helps connect students to off-campus rental housing.

"It's archaic (looking for off-campus student housing in Ann Arbor)," Jones says. "It's inefficient for most people. People talk to a friend or walk around in the cold and dial the numbers on the house."

Cribspot's website acts as one central location for landlords and students to offer and find rental housing around universities. Jones launched the startup a little more than a year ago, then called A2cribs, with Evan Dancer, Jason Okrasinski and Alex Gross. The idea of helping Ann Arbor students at U-M. It is now being used at half a dozen campuses across the U.S., including the University of Iowa, Michigan State University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

"Our main goal is to get all of that (housing) data on a map," Jones says.

The quartet of entrepreneurs took Cribspot to Bizdom in downtown Detroit and are working on turning it into a national brand. It wants to create a mobile app for its software and generate revenue from referrals for things like meal plans and furniture sales for students.

"We want to focus on just off-campus housing in college towns," Okrasinski says.

Source: Tim Jones and Jason Okrasinski, co-founders of Cribspot
Writer: Jon Zemke

Read more about Metro Detroit's growing entrepreneurial ecosystem at SEMichiganStartup.com.