Zillow vs. Apartments.com for Tenant Docs & Payments

[Tracey Lane]

We used to utilize Cozy for collecting rent payments. Loved their interface and everything always went smooth. Unfortunately, Apartments.com acquired them and is just not the greatest. I really don't like the way their website works and when we tried to post a recent apartment for rent, the listing never went live and my email to their customer service went unanswered completely. In contrast, we got a great response from our listing on Zillow. The Apartments.com site really just is very poorly built. We're considering moving our rent collection process to Zillow and we're wondering if anyone has done the same and has any issues. Also, do you think utilizing their state-specific lease is a bad idea? We're a small operation and only need to manage 4 units on one property. Thanks in advance.

[Ashley Chris]

Hi Tracey,

I was in your situation few months back. I was on cozy and got migrated to apartments.com

I listed my house on both, but got good response on zillow (and free ad on apartments.com got close to zero response, while I got about 1000 views and 40 emails in 2 weeks on zillow).

But all my payments and lease signing, I opted to go with apartments.com because their customer support was really good (I called them thrice and they navigated me through tenant on-boarding). I also maintain my expense records on apartments.com - overall I liked it

I plan to use both zillow (for listing) and apartments.com (for tenant engagement), in future