College Pads, a program which connects students with off-campus housing and apartments, is coming to the University of Idaho soon.
This third-party company acts as an all-in-one platform for tenants to connect with prospective roommates and for landlords to list availabilities. The service is comparable to sites like Zillow but focuses on college students seeking apartments.
ASUI Director of Community Relations Connor Dahlquist is working with Steve Catlin, a College Pads representative, and the UI Housing Department on this project. The program aims to streamline the process of finding an off-campus property and ensure the safety of tenants and landlords.
“It’s for University of Idaho-specific students who are looking for off-campus housing,” Dahlquist said. “They can find reliable housing, student reviews, landlord reviews — which has been an issue in the past especially in the Moscow community with fraudulent renting companies — and they incorporate other resources that the campus needs.”
The site provides an active map for apartment listings and roommate applications, including a range of descriptions and preferences, according to Dahlquist. To find a roommate, prospective tenants apply filters to a search, narrowing down details like gender, year in school, smoking and sleeping habits, cleanliness, guest policy, personality, campus location, preferred price of rent, preferred number of roommates and pet policy.
Organizing the meetings between College Pads, UI Housing, ITS and ASUI has been complex, according to Dahlquist. The university does not want to hold any liability in off-campus apartments but wants the UI-specific site to be UI branded, Dahlquist said.
“There’s a lot of legal review for this because there is a lot of liability, which is the kind of worrisome aspect of this,” Dahlquist said. “University of Idaho doesn’t want to be responsible. We want it to be branded for UI and not just some third-party resource because it would be a more reliable.”
ASUI Senator Kallyn Mai has worked with Dahlquist to garner ASUI Senate support for the project. Earlier this year, they passed resolution F20-R06, which encourages “creating a partnership with College Pads to create a new off-campus housing resource for Moscow-based students.”
UI’s IT Department is reviewing the contracts between the university and College Pads, which should be done by the end of 2020, according to Dahlquist. He hopes the website will be available early next semester, if not in the fall.
“I’m really excited about this program,” Dahlquist said. “There’s a lot of first-year student resources for students coming up to college for housing or Greek Life, but this is kind of the first opportunity for transfer students or older generation of UI students to have their own reliable resource and not be taken advantage of by landlords and unreliable resources.”
Carter Kolpitcke can be reached at [email protected].