For all you Apartment-Hunters: a Craigslist rival?

Especially around these months for college students, the drag of finding a place to live has had a strong presence.

Finding an apartment or a place to live in a great neighborhood for a low price can get, needless to say, very stressful and disappointing. However, the new start-up website, Naked Apartments, helps hopeful home renters and landlords find each other quickly and efficiently. The site's mission is to help qualified to-be home owners with landlords by processing their needs through search criteria.

First, renters sign up using anonymous profile accounts that ask for statistics such as annual income, preferred monthly rent, preferred apartment size, and preferred move-in date. As a further incentive, Naked Apartments will provide a free credit check to figure out the renter's credit score. Landlords and brokers can then search through these profiles and contact the renters who satisfy the requirements if they wish.

But how is this site monetized? The brokers and landlords have to pay $2 to contact a renter. This is a good catch, because landlords typically want to contact as many potential buyers as possible. Contacted renters can then choose which apartments are of interest to them. Ideally after the renters interact with the broker, they will write reviews of their experience regardless of the outcome. That way, other members will know which people to trust and search.

Naked Apartments also allows searchers to be proactive by allowing them to contact landlords about specific details on properties. So far 2,000 renters have found their dwellings through Naked Apartments with 100 brokers and landlords out of 13,000 total apartment listings for rent. The concept of Naked Apartments is solid in theory, but it still runs the risk of losing business to established sites such as Craigslist and Zillow.